issue: Politics

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.

Obama Has Demoted Liberty

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Barack Obama has demoted liberty and democracy as primary U.S. foreign policy goals, at least where the Middle East is concerned.  So the president informed the world in his address to the United Nations last week.

Obama said four “core interests” would henceforth guide U.S. policy toward the Middle East and North Africa: protecting our allies, ensuring the flow of oil, fighting anti-American terrorists, and preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. While he said U.S. efforts to “promote democracy, human rights, and open markets” will continue, they are now relegated explicitly to the second tier of U.S. interests.

Not so fast Mr. President. Shouldn’t Democrats at least be questioning Obama’s logic, if not raising objections?  After all, the president’s embrace of realpolitik is at odds with the party’s liberal internationalist outlook, which on balance has served America and the world well for seven decades.

Continue reading at CNN.

Creating jobs: Democrats need to stop business bashing and praise corporate investors

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. Now Occupy seems to be fizzling out, but tea party Republicans are plunging America into budget crises this fall.

The GOP’s surrender to fiscal anarchism gives President Obama and his party an opportunity to seize the high ground on jobs and economic growth. For that to happen, however, Democrats will need to eschew ritual business-bashing, embrace the productive forces in U.S. society and honor companies that are investing in America’s future.

The nation’s job drought is really an investment drought. Real government spending on productive assets from highways and bridges to computer equipment (net of depreciation) is down by half compared to the average level of the 2000s. Private sector investment is doing better but still falls well short of what the country needs. Many companies are still hoarding cash — about $2 trillion — or spending it on stock buy-backs, and investment outside of housing remains 20 percent below its long-term trend.

But many companies are investing at home. For the second year running, the Progressive Policy Institute has ranked the top 25 companies that are making the biggest bets on America’s economic future. These “Investment Heroes” invested nearly $150 billion last year in new plants, buildings and equipment (figures do not include investments in research and human capital).

Continue reading at the San Jose Mercury News.

Why Boehner’s to Blame

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The government of the United States of America is closed for business today, courtesy of the Republican Party. It’s a national embarrassment, like a scene from the Marx Brothers’ classic 1933 satire “Duck Soup,” only without the anarchic humor.

Hail Freedonia!

Who produced today’s farce? Was it the Tea Party hotheads, 50 or so House Republicans who love ideological combat but hate governing? Or was it Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the most cunning demagogue America has produced since Joe McCarthy?

All played their discreditable parts. But the man in the director’s chair is John Boehner, who is bidding for the title of worst House speaker in U.S. history.

Why Boehner? Because he knows better, and could have prevented the shut-down. And because, as America’s third-ranking constitutional officer, after the President and vice president, he is supposed to serve America’s interests — not the febrile demands of his party’s most rabid partisans. That’s Eric Cantor’s job.
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Read the entire piece at the New York Daily News.

The New Politics of Production: A Progressive High-Growth Strategy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Will Marshall’s piece, excerpted here, was part of the Policy Network’s recent publication “Progressive Politics after the Crash: Governing from the Left.”

The US is struggling to find a way out of overlapping economic crises. One is cyclical: a painfully slow, jobless recovery from a recession magnified by the 2008 financial crash. The other is structural: US economic output and job growth have fallen well off the pace of previous decades. Although liberal commentators seem preoccupied with rising inequality, America’s fundamental economic problem is slow growth.

Even before the recession struck, the once-mighty American job machine was sputtering. Between 2000 and 2007, the US posted its worst job creation record in any decade since the Great Depression. Not only have many good jobs vanished, but also real wages have fallen or turned stagnant for all but the top US earners.

Overall economic growth has been declining steadily since the halcyon years after World War II, when the babies boomed and GDP grew at a robust average of 4 per cent per year. National output fell to 3 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s, before picking up in the late 1990s. Since 2000, the economy has downshifted again, averaging under 2 per cent growth per year. Research from the Kauffman Foundation also suggests a loss of entrepreneurial verve. The number of business start-ups, which Kauffman says generate most of US net job growth, has plummeted by about a quarter since 2006.

If there is a bright spot in the US economy, it is the rebound of corporate profits and stock prices since 2009. Yet these gains also highlight a stark inequity: returns to capital are up, but returns to labour are down.

In President Kennedy’s day, US prosperity really did lift all boats. Today, however, productivity gains do not automatically translate into higher pay for workers, especially people with middling skills. ‘This is America’s largest economic challenge’, says the economist Robert J.  Shapiro. ‘People can no longer depend on rising wages and salaries when the economy expands.’

Amid such dismal conditions, Obama’s re-election by a comfortable margin (5 million votes) was an astounding political feat. Despite Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s claims that Obama fumbled the recovery, swing voters credited the president with having prevented the economy from capsizing during the perfect storm of 2008–9. It helped too that Romney offered no theory of his own for rekindling growth beyond hackneyed calls for lower taxes and regulation.

Unfortunately, little has happened since Obama’s victory to dispel the pall of economic pessimism that hangs over America. A late spring poll, for example, found that nearly 60 per cent of Americans worry about ‘falling out of (their) current economic class over the next few years’. No doubt subpar job growth is chiefly responsible for such unwonted gloom. According to preliminary figures, the number of people with jobs grew by only 28,000 (0.02 per cent) during Obama’s first term.

And there is little relief in sight. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts weak GDP growth and abnormally high unemployment persisting to the end of Obama’s second term. America is stuck in a slow-growth rut. While liberal Keynesians are calling for more shortterm spending to kick-start the pace of recovery, what progressives really need is a bolder plan for overcoming structural impediments to more robust growth.

Instead of devising one, Obama is bogged down in Washington’s endless trench warfare over taxes, spending and debt. True, the president won a tactical victory in averting the ‘fiscal cliff ’ and forcing Republicans to swallow higher tax rates on wealthy households. Yet this modest blow for tax fairness did little to fix the nation’s debt or stimulate growth. In fact, distributional politics distracts progressives from a truly historic opportunity to lay new foundations for US prosperity in the twenty-first century.

To inspire hope for such a change, the US president must broaden his message from fairness to growth: he must put America back on a highgrowth path. By setting audacious goals – say, doubling the growth rate and halving unemployment by the end of his second term – Obama
would convey the requisite sense of national urgency

A clarion call for renewed growth would create political space for progressive initiatives – public investments in training and education, broad tax reform – intended to spread economic gains more widely. And, by fanning hopes for a reversal of America’s economic decline, such a call could help Democrats make inroads among white working-class voters.

These voters, once the backbone of Democrats’ New Deal–Great Society coalition, have since defected en masse to the Republican camp. A conscious campaign to start winning them back, while retaining the Democrats’ strong advantages with young and minority voters, is the key to building a durable progressive majority and ending the 50:50 polarisation that has paralysed Washington.

Read the entire piece by Will Marshall.

The Atlantic: It’s Time for a New United Nations

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In March of 2011 and just hours before the United Nations Security Council vote, Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi promised citizens of Benghazi–his own countrymen–that he was “coming tonight” and that would show them “no mercy and no pity.” Gaddafi’s brazen statement telegraphed an impending attack with a high possibility massive civilian casualties.

In the Security Council immediately following Gaddafi’s threats, Russia and China–two permanent members with noted authoritarian governments themselves–abstained from voting on resolution 1973, which authorized “all necessary measures to protect civilians… including Benghazi.” (Germany, Brazil, and India, then-rotating members of the Security Council, abstained as well for their own reasons.)

In hindsight, Russia seems to have regretted its abstention. In January 2012, speaking about the growing civil war in Syria, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Australian TV that “the international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya and we would never allow the Security Council to authorize anything similar to what happened in Libya” in Syria.

That seems odd, because “what happened in Libya” was, on balance, a good thing: A sustained NATO air campaign unquestionably protected many more innocent civilians than it harmed and weakened Gaddafi’s forces en route to his downfall. What’s more, the Libya operation served as validation for those supporting the “responsibility to protect,” a 2006 Security Council mandate that called on parties involved in armed conflict to bear primary responsibility to protect civilians, approved by a unanimous 15-0 vote.

Continue reading at the Atlantic.

Foreign Policy: Absent Without Leave

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the late 1960s, Britain signaled the end of its long run as a world power by withdrawing from major military bases east of the Suez Canal. Today, as the White House confronts the crisis in Syria, could America be facing its own “east of Suez” moment?

The historical parallels aren’t exact. Britain was an empire; the United States isn’t — despite the tendentious polemics of inveterate anti-Americans, from Noam Chomsky to Glenn Greenwald. Britain had already been surpassed by bigger superpowers by the 1960s. That hasn’t happened to America and isn’t likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But the debate over intervention in Syria has illuminated large and growing cracks in the internationalist consensus that has underpinned U.S. global leadership since World War II.

That consensus has been strained to a breaking point by feral partisanship and by a Republican Party increasingly in thrall to libertarian ideas. As a skeptical Congress awaits a possible vote on President Barack Obama’s proposal to use military force against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the big question is whether the United States can still muster the internal cohesion to play a decisive role in world affairs.

In his prime-time address Sept. 10, Obama asked Congress to postpone the vote pending a possible deal with Russia that would transfer Syria’s chemical arsenal to international custody. The scheme could spare Obama the embarrassment of being rebuffed by Congress, where sentiment against a U.S. strike has been hardening. But the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s enabler and the U.S. president’s tormentor in chief, is the one throwing Obama a political lifeline should give us pause about the deal’s merits. To be sure, the deal would be good for Obama, allowing him to boast that his threat to use force compelled Assad to give up his chemical weapons. It might also earn Putin a Nobel Peace Prize. But it won’t end the agony of the Syrian people, because it would leave Assad free to go right on killing them with conventional weapons.

If Washington forswears the use of force against Syria, as Putin is demanding, it will have paid a very high price for reinforcing the norm against chemical warfare. The Russian gambit, moreover, may founder on its sheer impracticality: Will Assad, his back to the wall, really give up his most fearsome weapon? And how will U.N. weapons inspectors be able to find and remove all the regime’s chemical weapons in the middle of a war zone? Even from a purely logistical standpoint, the Russian proposal may be close to impossible.

Read the piece at Foreign Policy.

RealClearWorld: A Tipping Point in Syria?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As political violence engulfs the Middle East, the White House seems to sink deeper into incoherence and passivity. Will reports of a massive chemical attack on Syrian civilians finally rouse President Obama from his torpor, or will they become just the latest outrage du jour in the region’s never-ending horror show?

The Syrian opposition claimed that forces loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad used chemical weapons to kill over 1,000 civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Buttressing these reports were harrowing videos of people struggling to breath and photos of scores of bodies that born no outward signs of injury. If confirmed, the poison gas attack would put Assad in the same league as Iraq‘s Saddam Hussein, who used chemical bombs to wipe out 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.

The alleged massacre coincides with the arrival in Syria of a UN team charged with investigating reports that the regime unleashed small-scale chemical attacks against opponents last spring. The timing suggests how little Assad worries about crossing the “red line” President Obama has drawn against the use of chemical weapons. Or perhaps it’s a veiled warning about what he’s prepared to do if Western powers intervene in Syria.

Although warmly applauded by foreign policy “realists,” the administration’s resolve to stand aloof from crisis has been a strategic and moral failure. What began as a civil uprising has morphed into something worse: a full-fledged proxy war that is inflaming the region’s sectarian divisions. As Shia Iran and Hezbollah fight to save their ally Assad, Sunni jihadis — some marching under the banner of al Qaeda – are pouring into Syria. This makes it easier for Assad to posture as a protector of Alawite and Christian minorities and a bulwark against the very Salafist terrorists that keep U.S. intelligence agencies awake at night.

But this is emphatically not a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” America has no interest in the survival of a homicidal tyrant and war criminal like Assad, even if his fall presents openings to Sunni extremists in Syria. And in truth, the United States isn’t very good — thankfully — at the kind of cold blooded realpolitik that counsels standing by while Assad, Iran and Hezbollah and Sunni fanatics bleed each other in Syria.

Continue reading at RealClearWorld.

Tax Reform: Make It Simple

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Our tax code is broken. It’s a simple fact that nearly everyone agrees on, yet year after year our government leaders fail to address it. Meanwhile, the consequences of the overly complex and poorly designed system are felt by middle-class families and entrepreneurs. They benefit little from the existing array of incentives and loopholes, which are mainly targeted to special interests and the wealthy.

However, the hard work of tax reform is now underway. House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are barnstorming the country to hear directly from Americans – learning first-hand about the inefficiencies of the current system, and how taxpayers will be impacted by an array of proposed reforms.

Ultimately, the most likely feedback they will hear is the need for simplification of a system that has simply grown too complex for most Americans to understand, with damaging consequences to the nation’s economy. The tax code’s byzantine complexity costs business and individuals hundreds of billions in compliance. The IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate estimated that individual and business taxpayers spend 6.1 billion hours to complete filings. This is money and time wasted.

Continue reading at The Hill’s Congress Blog.