issue: Politics

Will Congress Regret Banning Earmarks?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes notes that one of the many unique aspects of this year’s unfolding budget clash is that this will be first budget battle without earmarks.

Generally, the disappearance of earmarks been seen as positive development, since everybody loves to hate earmarks. But say all you want about earmarks being wasteful or corrupt (even though that’s a debatable claim), they helped broker compromise. By giving enough members a stake in an omnibus appropriation bill, earmarks were mechanism whereby leaders could assemble a winning coalition to pass a budget bill, a powerful tool to avoid a government shutdown.

Here’s Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College, from a book about earmarks called Greasing the Wheels:

Pork barrel benefits, the most reviled of Congress’s legislative products, are used by policy coalition leaders to produce the type of policy that is most admired: general interest legislation. This book makes the case that buying votes with pork is an important way in which Congress solves its well-known collective action problem.

And here’s Scott A. Frisch and Sean Q. Kelly, writing in the National Journal last November:

The reality, as we see it, is that without earmarks it will be much more difficult to get moderate and liberal members to go along with spending cuts that may be necessary to reduce the deficit – one of the major goals of the tea party movement.  By eliminating earmarks, tea party supporters may have lost one of their most effective tools for building coalitions to make painful cuts in spending. Earmarks can be viewed as the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitter medicine of deficit reduction go down; without earmarked projects, enacting tough legislation will be even more difficult.

(Frisch and Kelly are the authors of a book called Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks are Good for Democracy.)

Remember, even at their height, earmarks accounted for roughly two percent of all appropriations expenditures. And that two percent hasn’t necessarily been cut out of the budget – it’s just been transferred the executive branch for allocation instead of being Congressionally-directed.

Now, I understand that there were some lobbying abuses in the world of earmarks, but my sense is that most offices were actually remarkably transparent about their earmarks (and indeed happy to brag about their projects). I never saw any reason for banning them and thought it was all silly red-herring type politics that distracted us from more difficult but far more consequential fights over entitlements.

Maybe the folks in Congress will figure out how to come to some sort of eventual budget agreement without a bunch of earmarks to grease the wheels, and we’ll all be better off because of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if, when budget negotiations grind to a standstill, the good folks running Congress might wish that they hadn’t prevented themselves from sweetening the pot with a few special district spending programs.

Obama Gets His Comeuppance For Failing the Lobbying Purity Test

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you search through the White House visitor logs, you can find me. In fact, I’ve been to the Obama White House twice (though I seem to have two records for the same visit). Let me explain: A good friend of mine worked at CEQ for a while. Once, she took some friends on a tour of the White House. Once, we went to see the Christmastime decorations at the East Wing. However, if I had visited this friend at her office, which was not the White House but instead at Jackson Place, there’d be no trace of me in the White House visitor logs.

Yesterday, Politico ran a story noting this fact and insinuating that lobbying meetings were intentionally being moved to Jackson Place, or to the nearby Caribou Coffee on 17th Street, just so that they wouldn’t show up in the visitor logs. Many bloggers, especially those on the right have jumped all over Obama for this supposed hypocrisy. The ever-clever Michelle Malkin triumphantly rhymed: “Obama lied, transparency died.” Common Cause asked Obama to disclose every meeting regardless of where it occurs.

Now, I really don’t know if the Administration moved meetings off-campus so that they didn’t show up in the visitor logs. It seems to me like a silly thing to do. I’m trying to imagine what visitor would be so terrible that his or her presence in the visitor logs would be an instant scandal. I can’t. Based on what I know about the scarcity of space in the White House, I’m willing to buy the rationale that meetings were held elsewhere just because that’s where space could be found.

But I can see why people in the White House might be unnecessarily sensitive about who they are meeting with. The problem is that from Day One, when the Administration placed a ban on registered lobbyists serving in the White House, it tried to place itself somehow above and beyond the influence of lobbyists.

But as anybody who has spent any time in Washington knows, lobbyists are part of the policymaking fabric in this town, like it or not. To try to govern without at least getting their input and occasional buy-in is simply impossible. There are reasons to be concerned about their influence and power, but simply demonizing them as to-be-avoided-at-all-costs is not helpful, and almost certainly counter-productive.

In many ways, Obama has held himself to a standard that was far beyond reach. Of course he wasn’t going to rid Washington of special interests. But that’s politics. Everybody comes to Washington to change the way business is done. Nobody is ever powerful/foolhardy enough to do so.

One of the reasons that Obama was able to make White House visitor logs public is because the Secret Service keeps close track of everyone going in and out of the White House. When I’ve visited, somebody had to see my ID and check me in. What I can glean from yesterday’s press conference transcript is that this puts me into something called the “the WAVES system.” And when you’ve got an electronic database, it’s easy to make it public. And there’s no reason not to do so.

Maybe meeting disclosure should extend to Jackson Place. Maybe it should extend to Caribou Coffee. Should it extend to every phone call? Every kid’s soccer game an administration staffer attends where lobbyists might have kids playing as well? Where do you draw the line?  Washington is in many respects one big social network. And lobbyists, the majority of whom once worked in government, are part of that network.

I suppose what Obama should have said from the beginning was that he was doing the best he can. He was going to make White House visitor logs public because the White House belongs to everyone, and everyone should know who is visiting. But that he also recognized that the White House is not a compound on a hill, and that disclosing visitor logs is not going to capture all the conversations he or anyone on his staff ever has with an interested party. Moreover, he could have also said that he valued the inputs of everyone, be they lobbyists or not. And that he and his staff had enough integrity, thank you very much, to cut through the self-serving BS of lobbyists.

But instead, Obama succumbed to the familiar politics of purity and moralizing when it came to lobbyists. This moment of gotcha journalism, I suppose is his comeuppance. When you hold yourself to unrealistic standards, it’s bound to come sooner or later.

Six Months Is Too Short For Egypt’s Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Arab revolutions have overthrown one dictator after another in strikingly orderly fashion. There’s an almost biblical quality to it: Tunisia begat Egypt, and Egypt begat Libya and Bahrain. One of the problems of such a linear evolution of revolutions is that we tend to focus on only one at a time. Remember Egypt? Barely – it’s yesterday’s news. And Tunisia feels like it happened in the Bush administration (note: it didn’t).

As our gaze floats from one country to the next, it’s worth remembering that now—when the hard work of democracy begins—is just as crucial a time across the Arab world. Political parties, civil society organizations and democratic institutions are just beginning to form. As in any power vacuum, Egypt’s infant governing class is scrambling first to organize the pillars of democracy, and then to contest power.

In the United States, we have become conditioned to expect things immediately – I’ve taken time to respond to no less than three emails as I’ve written the paragraphs above – rather than applying a good dose of patience as I crank this piece out. To us, the six months set between a revolution and Egyptian elections seems like more than enough time to hold a democratic vote. But when you’re starting from nothing, six months just isn’t enough time.

From WSJ:

As hopes rise for Egypt’s first elections, political parties are sprouting like weeds. Activists, businessmen and community leaders are all forming new parties they hope will widen Egypt’s limited menu of political options.

The nascent parties are both secular and Islamist, but for the most part they agree on one thing: more time than the target for elections—in less than six months—may be needed for these groups to have a real impact. Some also worry that elections too soon would greatly favor the Muslim Brotherhood, which already has a large-scale social organization in place.

And the Washington Post:

Al-Wasat waited 15 years, one month and nine days for official permission to operate, which a court granted Saturday. The party, started by a group that split away from the Muslim Brotherhood to promote a more tolerant form of Islam, has little more behind it than a Web site, the bonds formed during years of suppression and a shared desire for democracy.

An organization so recently banned has no sign announcing its presence, and reporters traveled around the block a few times searching for the office… “We could never meet people here in Egypt,” said Tareq El Malt, an architect and member of the executive committee whose own neighbors don’t know the party exists. Elections are expected in six months, but El Malt said that before the party thinks about winning seats in parliament, it has to figure out how to organize and operate.

Six months is too short for a truly organized, healthy political class to mature into a set of diverse but not scattered parties that can form a stable governing coalition. Is a year? Most probably not, but it would be better.

If the time comes when Egypt’s temporary ruling council delays the vote beyond August, it’s not necessarily because the council is attempting to thwart democracy. It may be just the opposite – a delay, even a relatively short one, would likely significantly benefit the long-term prospects for a stable Egyptian governing coalition.

Overcoming the Obstacles to Charter School Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on charter schools the Progressive Policy Institute held at the National Press Club today to launch a new PPI report: “Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality Charter Schools,” by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger.

Bryan Hassel led off the panel by discussing his report, which begins from the premise that high-performing charter schools need to grow faster in order to serve more low-income children. “They only serve a tiny fraction of the students, only ten percent,” he said. “And the average number of schools being added annually is 1.3 schools. Only five CMOs [Charter Management Organizations] are planning to have more than 30 schools in their network by 2025. I don’t see a lot of prospects for serving millions of kids who need these schools.”

Hassel’s report focuses on urging leading CMOs to think big, and he distills nine lessons from high-growth organizations in the private sector that could apply to charters. On the panel he focused on four: generating cash flow, tackling talent scarcity, reaching customers where they are, and finding top leaders committed to growth.

To improve cash flow, he proposed a pay-for-performance scheme: “What if the best charters were paid more?” Hassel asked. “What if the top 10 percent received 10 percent more? Then they could invest in growth. And then we’d pay worse charter schools less, which would hasten the closing of the worst charter schools.”

To improve reach, Hassel proposed micro-reach and micro-chartering strategies: “How do you do more without having to find a facility?” Hassel said. “One idea is that policymakers could issue charters not just to whole schools but to individual teachers who want to serve 20-40 kids.”

Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network (who was featured in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”), applauded the goal of rapid growth. Success Charter Network has doubled in size every for the last four years, and will open up two more in the next year. “And I don’t die of exhaustion,” said Moskowitz, “I could keep going.”

And when she says exhaustion, she means exhaustion from the politics. “In our world it’s really hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “It’s the teachers’ union blockading students and preventing them from entering the school. We’re talking about having to ask police to come to usher our kids, five year olds, into the building” These politics, she noted, put real obstacles on growth.

Andrew Rotherham, partner at Bellwether Education Partners and former PPI colleague, echoed Hassel’s call for scaling up. “This field does not understand scale,” he said. “The only thing we consistently know how to scale is problems, bad ideas, and perverse incentives.”

Like Moskowitz, he also put a focus on politics. “We’ve done a poor job of using regulation and incentives,” he said. “Really there’s only one state, Michigan, that in meaningful ways incentivizes a process where good charter schools can replicate effectively.”

Rotherham noted that in many ways, top charter schools have grown beyond expectations. Once upon a time people predicted KIPP would never expand beyond two dozen schools (it is now at 100) and TFA would never expand beyond 500 core members (it now has 20,000 alums). But he also posed a question for future growth: “Do we need more CMOs or bigger CMOs? We talk about more-more-more, but what should it look like.”

R. Brooks Garber, vice president of federal advocacy for National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, added a note of caution to the rapid growth strategy. Quality control is important, he said. “It takes only one failure, and one failure would be the end of the brand. We open schools one grade at a time.” But he agreed that charter schools could be more strategic.

Hassel responded by suggesting that even if rapid expansion resulted in slightly reduced performance for top charter schools, it would still probably be better than the alternative – the continuation of inferior public or other charter schools.

All and all, the discussion highlighted the tensions between the aspirations of rapid growth and the substantial on-the-ground obstacles, both political and organizational. Everyone wants high-performing charters to grow faster. But it ain’t easy.

Wingnut Watch: Re-capping the CPAC Fireworks

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 2011 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington over the weekend provided, as always, a sort of dysfunctional family picnic for the self-conscious Right, and an opportunity for a large cast of would-be 2012 presidential candidates to tug the forelock to The Movement and beat up on the godless socialist foe.

Aficionados of conservative ideological infighting had a lot of entertainment at this year’s CPAC. There was, as reported in last week’s Wingnut Watch, lots of maneuvering over participation in the conference, with the conservative gay organization GOProud and the conservative Muslim group Muslims for America serving as the big flashpoints.

While most CPAC attendees (and some not attending, such as Sarah Palin) more or less defended inclusion of GOProud, its leader, Chris Barron, did himself no favors by calling critics “bigots.” There are reports the group won’t be invited back next year. Similarly, Muslims for America’s patron, anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, made few friends by calling critics of CPAC’s agenda “losers,” and promptly earned an anathema from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who called on conservatives to come up with a better venue for coordination than Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings.

The most visible sign of ideological problems at CPAC involved, predictably, the Ron Paul brand of libertarians, who noisily heckled the presentation of a “Defender of the Constitution” award by Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld. (Paulites might justly claim this was too much provocation for any libertarian to resist, and CPAC organizers really screwed up by scheduling the award just after a speech by Rand Paul.)

But the social conservative complaint that fiscal hawks, libertarians, and/or political pragmatists were trying to subordinate their agenda probably exposed a more serious problem for the Right, and also a source of considerable confusion about the much-envied role of the Tea Party Movement. Certainly those, most conspicuously Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who have argued for a temporary suspension of any talk about cultural issues, are being touted by many observers as representing the Tea Partiers’ alleged single-minded focus on deficits, debts, and limited government.

But no less prominent a figure as Rush Limbaugh has sought to identify the Tea Party Movement with social conservatives and indeed with anyone wanting an ideologically exclusive Republican Party:

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, himself considered a conservative icon, blasted this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference for drowning out tea partiers and those concerned with social issues, lamenting, “That’s not the CPAC that I’ve always thought of or known.”

Saying he was concerned that “I might just drum myself out of a movement,” Limbaugh blamed the “ruling class” at CPAC for missing the message of the 2010 election, namely that there is “an unmistakable conservative ascendancy happening in this country,” evidenced most prominently in the tea-party movement….

Instead, Limbaugh said, CPAC seemed smitten with the idea of dumping traditionally conservative values in order to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.

“So you had a weird list of priorities and focus. I mean we had it all,” Limbaugh said. “We had GOProud, the gay conservatives. We had demands to legalize drugs, marijuana at CPAC. Most conservatives strongly oppose gay marriage and legalized pot.”

He continued, “The position of some people who spoke at CPAC: ‘Look, if you’re worried about immigration, stop it. We don’t want to be seen as racist. Stop talking about abortion, stop talking about the social issues, stop talking about all this. That’s only gonna hurt; we don’t need to deal with that in our party.’ This is what the ruling class guys were saying at CPAC.”

A conservative movement that can’t decide whether Mitch Daniels is the leader of the Tea Party Movement, or its deadliest “ruling class” enemy, has got some issues to sort out.

Ideological conflict aside, the role of CPAC as the first serious event in the Invisible Primary leading to the Republican presidential nomination was on full display this weekend, but produced no game-changing results.

The presidential straw poll held on the final day of the conference was easily won, for the second year in a row, by Ron Paul (whose collegiate admirers were out in force), an outcome that instantly devalued it as a indicator of future developments in the nominating process. Mitt Romney, whose PAC probably devoted more resources to the conference than anyone else’s, finished second, while every other name wound up in the low-to-mid single digits.

As for speechifying, there were some putative presidents who did better than others (though experts differed on “winners and losers”), but no real knockout punches or disasters. None of the longest shots (e.g., Herman Cain, John Bolton, Rick Santorum) did anything to vault themselves into serious contention.

Most candidates modestly met their most immediate needs. Tim Pawlenty showed he could give a fiery red-meat speech. Haley Barbour touted a right-wing record as governor of Mississippi (boasting of both Medicaid cuts and harassment of abortion providers), reminding listeners he’s a serious reactionary, not just a fundraiser. Mitt Romney stuck to tried-and-true conservative themes and showed once again he’s as smooth as Obama as a speaker. Mitch Daniels dealt with his “cultural issues truce” problem, and interestingly enough, did so by doubling down on his argument that fiscal issues, the “red menace” of our time, have to come first. Newt Gingrich showed he can still wow a live audience with his wonkery and one-liners.

It’s not really clear, however, that the no-shows (most notably Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee) lost anything by spending their weekend elsewhere.

We’ll soon see if the ideological fissures exposed by CPAC continue to widen or instead subside; the internal fights of the congressional GOP over legislative and budget priorities show all’s not well on that front.

Meanwhile, it’s finally fish-or-cut-bait time for GOP presidential candidates, or those who don’t already have near-universal name ID and some sort of history with Iowans. Newt Gingrich has said he’ll make up his mind whether to run by the end of February; John Thune seems to be on the same timetable. Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels, both sitting governors, will wait until their current legislative sessions end in April. At present, you’d have to guess Gingrich and Barbour are in, while Thune and Daniels are out, though nobody knows for sure. And it’s anybody’s guess what Palin and Huckabee will do; the shape of the field will remain amorphous until those two figure out how they will spend their time in 2012.

End Separate War Spending

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s federal budget season. Before you doze off, stick with me: there’s a deceptive budgetary maneuver that is costing you billions in defense dollars, forcing progressive members of Congress into uncomfortable votes on Iraq and Afghanistan, and defying every historical precedent in Pentagon budgeting.

This maneuver is the supplemental appropriation for war funding. Every year since the United States launched military operations in Afghanistan in response to the September 11th attacks, Congress has appropriated separate funds for unanticipated wartime costs in addition to the Pentagon’s baseline budget. In some years, only one extra war spending bill is approved; in 2010, two supplemental appropriations were passed.

Supplemental war funding appropriations are hardly new, beginning in World War II. When used correctly, the process serves as a vital tool that delivers timely funding to America’s fighting men and women. In the initial stages of combat, supplemental appropriations are extraordinarily useful in the face of the lengthy Congressional budget process, which does not allow for unanticipated military spending. Typically, the supplemental funds pay for pre-deployment costs, servicemembers’ transportation to the warzone, combat operations, equipment needs, and military construction. Without this tool, the Pentagon would essentially be forced to sacrifice long-term projects to meet immediate wartime needs.

Here’s the rub: Under the Bush administration, allegedly “emergency” supplemental appropriations for war costs became routine avenues for backdoor spending. Their opaque nature and lack of oversight have created a propensity to fund low-priority programs that has effectively eroded any sense of fiscal discipline at the Pentagon, bloating military spending. We must put an end to the practice

The Department of Defense (DoD) is the unquestioned champion of discretionary spending—money the government chooses to spend, rather than is obliged to pay for entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. With more than $700 billion in discretionary funds available, the Pentagon far outpaces its nearest competition, the Department of Health and Human Services, at $80 billion.

Since 2001, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that Congress has approved $1.12 trillion in supplemental appropriations, 90 percent of which—$1.01 trillion—has been destined for the Department of Defense. One estimate is that Congress has no control over one-fifth of supplemental war spending; therefore, a rough calculation suggests that some $200 billion has been wasted in 10 years.

While those on the extreme left and in the Tea Party would like to see slashes in the Pentagon’s spending, what DoD’s budget really needs is not gutting, but a solid dose of discipline.

Read the policy memo

Can the Republicans Really Pull Off $100 Billion in Cuts?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Well, that was quick. Rather than risk a mutiny, House Republican leaders have agreed to now cut $100 billion from the $1.1 trillion federal budget, rather than their original plan of a mere $40 billion. The question is: Can they pull it off? And if they do, will they come to regret it?

Yesterday, I predicted a coming Republican crack-up based on the premise that the Young Turks of the Tea Party are out to take a stand (gosh darnit!) against big government, but it’s a stand that’s not compatible with the continued electoral success of the Republican Party. And the spending cuts are a perfect example.

Say Republican leaders are indeed serious about  cutting $100 billion. Where will they cut? A new Pew poll found only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and Unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). Neither of these are big ticket items.

The only other area that is close to even is Defense (30 percent for a decrease, 31 percent for an increase). Defense accounts for about half of discretionary spending. But I’m guessing a good percentage of those 31 percent who want to increase the military are solid Republican base voters.

So here’s the hard reality: There is some serious bloodlust going around Washington about cutting the budget, in part because there is some serious bloodlust about cutting the budget in the Tea Party base. But when it comes down to the actual programs that will get cut, the picture changes.

You see, many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, why would you go and cut my well-deserved Medicare benefits when you could be cutting federal salaries or aid to the poor? In fact, with the exception of federal pay and foreign aid or aid to the poor, it’s hard to find a single government program or funding source that any majority would support cutting.

Democrats, of course, know this, and are just waiting for Republicans to go wild with their proposed cuts – especially Senate Democrats, who will play the role of putting the pieces back together.

In the end, there are two likely scenarios. In one, Republican leaders hold to the Tea Party line, but play right into Democrats’ hands, demanding harsh cuts — and in the process they awaken all kinds of anxious voters who are now suddenly worried about protecting the programs that benefit them. In the other, Republicans compromise, but alienate the Tea Party contingent, leading to an internecine battle. Either way, it’s not gonna be a pretty scene for the GOP.

The Defense Budget Sleight of Hand That’s Costing You Billions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Look, I get it. If you’re not a budget wonk, I can understand how you might not care about this stuff. But if you’re a progressive and you’re concerned about the Tea Party destroying the EPA for no good reason, then that’s reason to pay attention.

I’ve written a policy memo about something else that is crucial to understand if we want to even the discussion of getting Defense spending under control: it’s simply vital that we end the practice of supplemental war funding bills.

Wait! Wait! Don’t fall asleep. Seriously. We’ve wasted $200 billion over the last ten years through a little-discussed system of back-door Pentagon budgeting, which essentially funds the stuff on DoD’s wish list by falsely calling them “emergency war necessities.” Why, for example, did Congress give Don Rumsfeld an $11 billion slush fund to spend as he pleases without any Congressional oversight?

We have to end this systematic abuse of your taxpayer dollars — start reading here to find out how.

Read the policy memo

A Serious Man

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As political handicappers weigh the impact on next year’s elections of Senator Jim Webb’s decision not to seek a second term, this much is certain: His departure will leave the Senate a less interesting place.

Webb is an original: Annapolis graduate, decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, acclaimed novelist, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and, following his improbable 2006 victory, Democratic Senator from Virginia.

Improbable not just because he started way behind, but also because he had previously been a Republican; because this erstwhile warrior rode a tide of anti-war sentiment to victory; and, because he is anything but a natural politician.  A private, self-contained man, Webb does not lust for the limelight or feed on public adoration.  He doesn’t like to press the flesh or ask fat cats for money. He is essentially a writer whose political model was the late intellectual-turned-legislator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

While marching to his own beat, Webb has quietly made his mark in the Senate over the past four years. He successfully pushed an expansion of G.I. Bill-style benefits for veterans, and drawn attention to an issue that isn’t on the nation’s political radar but should be: America’s overstuffed prisons and indiscriminate sentencing policies that lock up too many non-violent offenders. Following his own passions, Webb has specialized in foreign affairs, focusing especially on East Asia.

Also like Moynihan, Webb’s outlook has been shaped by a strong ethnic consciousness. Just as Moynihan drew on his Irish background in his studies of the ethnic melting pot, Webb, in Born Fighting and other books, has chronicled the Scots-Irish experience in America. Settled on the America frontier, Scots-Irish Protestants pushed relentlessly westward, battling Indians (and Mexicans) along the way. They form the core of a genuine warrior culture that, argues German writer Josef Joffe in Uberpower: the Imperial Temptation of America, has mostly disappeared from Europe but remains a key element of American exceptionalism.

Webb’s departure will be a significant political loss for Democrats, but not because it may put his Senate seat in jeopardy. More fundamentally, Webb is a rarity in today’s contemporary Democratic Party: a leader with an intuitive feel for the interests and values of white working class voters. Once the mainstay of the progressive New Deal coalition, their defection to the Republicans led to a generation of GOP ascendancy in national politics.

More than most Democrats, Webb has thought hard how about to win them back. He has chided his party for exhibiting anti-military attitudes, and for pushing economic policies that favor elites who profit from globalization to the detriment of working families, whose incomes have stagnated as good jobs have vanished over the last two decades. Bravely, he has taken on the “diversity” industry that promotes group preferences in hiring, government contracting and college admissions, even for recent female and minority immigrants who can by no stretch of the imagination be classified as victims of U.S. racism.

As it happens, the modern Democratic Party emerged under Andrew Jackson, America’s first Scots-Irish President. The “democracy” as it was often called was the party of ordinary people, while the Whigs represented economic and social elites. Much of middle America now feels estranged from the party of the people.

That’s an existential dilemma for progressives, not just a political problem. Jim Webb understands that, which is why I’m sorry to see him go.

The Coming Republican Crack-up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I am hardly surprised to read today’s news that the House Republican leadership is losing floor votes due to mini-revolts within the party. With 87 freshmen and a large contingent of Tea Party types who came to Washington with a head of steam and little loyalty to the Republican establishment, it always seemed dubious to me that anybody short of Joseph Stalin was going to be able to keep this coalition together. And you can say all the mean things you want about John Boehner; he is no Joseph Stalin.

Four weeks in, and not everybody in the Republican caucus is going along with what was supposed to be routine vote to temporarily extend anti-terrorism provisions in the Patriot Act. Though surely the bigger issue is that the party’s most conservative members are demanding $100 billion in domestic cuts instead of the mere $40 billion originally planned. My prediction: this is but a preview of a coming internecine war within the Republican Party.

The reasons for this are straightforward. By taking back the House on the wave of the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters, Republicans got a radical faction that demanded and frankly expected something big and revolutionary to happen. And if they didn’t get that something big and revolutionary they would damn well yell and scream trying.

As I wrote back in November: “Good luck, Speaker Boehner: If you aren’t aggressive enough, you will lose the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters. But if you are too aggressive, you will lose the majority of independents who are worried you are going too far. And you’ll need to please both to keep your majority.”

Being minority leader is easy, especially in the House. The instructions are simple: Vote no. Always. Do everything you can to embarrass and undermine the majority party. And if you throw enough sand in the gears, you can successfully campaign on how ineffectual the majority party has been. Stay disciplined. You will have your chance.

Being majority leader is hard. Once your team is in power, everybody has their ideas about what they want to do, and everyone thinks it’s their turn now. Being majority leader is especially hard when a significant part of your caucus is backed by an angry base hungry for a purifying hot tub time machine journey back to 1789, when America was a small upstart nation of farmers and healthcare involved leeches.

I suspect what we are seeing is just the beginning of a coming crack-up. And a lot of this is going to be over spending cuts.

The main fault line is not hard to follow: Republican leaders like John Boehner have been around politics long enough to know that when you start cutting (or even threatening to cut) programs, people who benefit from those programs get upset. Really upset (see:  attempt to privatize Social Security).

But the Tea Party base is riled up, and whatever Republican leaders propose, they are always going to be convinced that MORE is needed. Here are some of what I take to be representative comments from a National Review article on how Republican leaders are trying to come around to the $100 billion in cuts:

“Slash? Considering the size of our current and projected debt, $100 billion is but a nick.”

“back to 2008 level is at least 500 billion in cuts. Promise is not kept”

“I smell a rat. It’s inconceivable that more money cannot be cut from this bloated budget.”

So, stay tuned. These folks are not motivated by practical or even political concerns. They are motivated by a kind of messianic ideology. These are the people who don’t believe in compromise. So once more, good luck Speaker Boehner. Though really, I don’t think even luck can save you now.

Wingnut Watch: What to Look For at the CPAC Meeting

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tomorrow every wingnut’s attention will be on Washington, where the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) begins its annual meeting and vetting session for Republican presidential candidates. The three-day affair will end with a straw poll of attendees that becomes, for better or worse, a data point in the nominating process (last year’s straw poll was sort of ruined, according to most accounts, when Ron Paul’s college-aged supporters packed the room and won it for him). The significance of the event has probably been increased by the late-developing presidential field; this really does represent, as Michael Shear of the New York Times put it yesterday, the “starter’s pistol” for the 2012 cycle.

There’s always some maneuvering about who shows up and doesn’t show up, and who’s behind the scenes manipulating things, at CPAC meetings. But this year is kind of special in that there has been a sustained and ostensibly ideological effort to boycott the event from the right. It’s been organized by social conservatives who are unhappy that a gay conservative group—known as GOProud, which is distinct from the better-known Log Cabin Republicans in that it is more explicitly conservative on issues other than GLBT rights—has been allowed to become one of the meeting’s many sponsors.

More generally, elements of the Christian Right may be using this brouhaha to send a message that they will not accept subordination to those in the conservative movement who demand an exclusive focus on fiscal issues. Indeed, in addition to the GOProud’s inclusion, one of the grievances against CPAC among social conservatives is the very fact that Mitch Daniels has been given a featured speaking slot, presumably as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels has enraged the Cultural Right by calling for a “truce” in the culture wars, which from their point of view means a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding refusal to go beyond lip service on issues like abortion, gay rights and church-state separation.

There’s a secondary behind-the-scenes issue with CPAC that’s drawn less attention outside the fever swamps of right-wing internecine warfare: anger among Islamophobes at the inclusion of a group called Muslims for America, which noted neoconservative agitator Frank Gaffney has attacked as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brouhaha in turn reflects long-standing hostility among some conservatives to the efforts of anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, long a fixture at CPAC meetings, to legitimize Muslim-American organizations and convince Republicans to pursue Muslim voters.

Finally, some conservatives have always had issues with CPAC due to concerns over the alleged financial irregularities of David Keene, long-time head of the American Conservative Union, the primary sponsor of the event. It’s often hard to untangle the personal from the ideological in these disputes, but they both definitely exist.

In any event, eight significant conservative organizations have joined the boycott of this year’s CPAC conference, the most prominent being the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. But the boycott hasn’t had much of an effect on the would-be presidents invited to speak. According to Slate’s Dave Weigel, no-shows by Sen. Jim DeMint and House Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan may be partially attributable to sympathy for the boycott, and/or for the complaints of social conservatives that their agenda is being deep-sixed.

It’s also possible that the most notable no-shows, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, are being influenced by it; it’s hard to say, though in an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody, Palin seemed to be saying in her elliptical manner that she had no problem with GOProud’s inclusion in the conference. Palin has now found reason to skip four CPACs in a row, and some of her detractors say she simply does not want to speak without a hefty fee and an unchallenged spotlight.

Others have interpreted Huckabee’s and Palin’s decision to take a pass as indicating they really aren’t running for president in 2012. Influential Iowa Republican activist Craig Robinson took this tack in ranking the presidential candidates’ potential appeal in his state’s pivotal caucuses, refusing to list Huckabee and Palin as members of the potential field.

So background noise aside, what should astute observers look for at CPAC, particularly in the cattle-call series of “featured speeches” that begin with Michele Bachmann tomorrow and conclude with fiery Tea Party congressman Alan West of Florida on Saturday? Obviously the straw poll results—and the frantic efforts of the winner and the losers to spin them—will be of interest. The speeches may get tedious to non-conservatives; this is not a venue for truth-telling challenges to conservative shibboleths, and the smell of red meat will be overpowering. You can count on metronomic shout-outs to the power and the glory of the Tea Party Movement, and vast quantities of Obama-bashing.

Since no one can rival Michele Bachmann in appealing to the conservative id, I’d keep an eye on her speech, particularly since she’s playing with the idea of running for president (probably if Palin does not run), and could be formidable in Iowa. Similarly, a much longer long-shot for the presidency, John Bolton, could use his Saturday address to play off the news from Egypt and challenge both the administration and his fellow-conservatives to treat the disturbances in the Middle East as an Islamist threat to U.S. security.

But the most interesting speeches may be from presidential wannabes not known for their ability to get conservative crowds growling and roaring. Tim Pawlenty, for example, is putting together a credible Iowa campaign and seems to be every Republican’s second choice, but desperately needs to show he can fire up the troops. Mitt Romney (who won the CPAC straw poll at this point in the 2008 cycle) needs to recapture the mojo that made him the “true conservative” candidate four years ago, particularly now that he’s being generally depicted as representing what’s left of the moderate tradition in the GOP. Rick Santorum is a good bet to bring the grievances of the Christian Right into the open. Haley Barbour could really use a speech branding himself as something other than a former tobacco lobbyist who can raise large stacks of cash when he isn’t displaying an unfortunate nostalgia for the Old South.

It should be a good show, and an illustration of the hard-core Right’s emergence from the sidelines of Republican politics into the very center of power and attention.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Obama Raises his Bet on High-Speed Rail

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?

Since winning control of the House, Republicans have been angling to cancel the administration’s high-speed rail program as part of their deficit reduction plan. Their goal is to halt the program before any new train segment is constructed in Florida and California (where plans are most advanced) and to rescind funds appropriated but not yet spent on other passenger rail lines under the stimulus act.

Yesterday, the administration called their bluff by asking for $8 billion for fast trains in the 2012 federal budget, followed by $45 billion over the next five years.

The proposal puts a bold but reasonable dollar sign on President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to bring high-speed rail to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The federal government now spends about $35 billion a year to maintain its highway system. Washington will have to spend considerably more to expand roads to accommodate a growing population if new train lines are not in the transportation mix.

Assets Matter

But to make high-speed rail happen, the White House needs to mount a better public education campaign. For starters, the president must hammer home the point that developing modern infrastructure matters just as much as cutting spending.

In other words, while we want to avoid government waste that raises the national debt, productive debt – or debt that creates future opportunities for all citizens – is not a burden, especially when money can be borrowed at record low interest rates.

A presidential trip to General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., could demonstrate that America has an existing manufacturing base for high-speed rail. This base needs to be tapped before more jobs migrate to countries that actually make things.

GE has pledged to develop high-speed trainsets aimed for the California and Florida lines. CEO Jeffrey Immelt could pitch in by tasking his big financial arm, GE Capital, to help finance promising rail projects.

President Obama should also lean on his newfound friends at the Chamber of Commerce. Joe Biden got it right yesterday by warning that “commerce is going to suffer and it’s going to show up on the bottom line” if the U.S. does not improve the flow of people and goods. Building and operating high-speed lines would also create tens of thousands of middle-class jobs.

Reforming Congressional Spending

Public persuasion must be matched by a more clear-eyed view of how to fund this long-term program without the uncertainty of annual congressional appropriations.

The six-year surface transportation bill coming before this session of Congress could be an excellent vehicle for the White House to develop a reliable source for high-speed rail funding. We have outlined in a policy memo how to restructure the transportation bill, now beset by wasteful congressional earmarks, into a productive program that leverages public money with private capital.

While the White House and House Republicans currently appear far apart on high-speed rail policy, there are areas of compromise. House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has been critical of stimulus money spent on existing rail lines for upgraded passenger service. Mica says he is in favor of “true” high-speed rail that operates above 150 mph and would support federal funds that reduce trip times along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor.

There seems to be room for the White House to accommodate Mica’s concerns, including expediting an environmental impact study that currently hangs up progress in the Northeast Corridor, and ways for Mica to persuade his colleagues that reflexively obstructing rail projects is not the way to bequeath America a better transportation future.

Roots of Reaganolatry

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.

As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.

But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:

First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.

Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.

Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.

Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.

And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

Cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Another Look at the Leveling Off of Lobbying

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Washington Post’s reporting on the apparent leveling off of Washington lobbying expenditures has a misleading but telling lede: “Could the great lobbying gold rush be over?”

The more banal misunderstanding tied up in this framework is the tendency to overhype small changes, which,  of course, is the nature of a news business in which every new piece of information demands a story. But if lobbying is indeed a gold rush (more on this shortly), it’s hard to see how this gold rush could be over when organizations are still spending $9.5 million a day (or $3.5 billion a year) on it.

Rather, given the amount of money that is still spent, it seems like it’s still very much a booming business, and as I’ve written before, my strong guess is that this is but a hiccup in what has been and will continue to be a steadily increasing interest in lobbying. Any speculation about the demise of lobbying is presumably much over-rated.

The more significant misunderstanding is that lobbying is a gold rush, and I think this is a more pervasive misunderstanding. Do companies and other organizations come to Washington to pursue special programs, earmarks, tax breaks? No doubt many do, and this is a non-trivial part of the lobbying business.

But look at who the heaviest spenders on lobbying are, and you’ll not find a lot of gold rushing.

I stole the excellent chart below from the Center for Responsive Politics, which does an invaluable service in collecting federal lobbying data.

Client 2010 Total 2009 Total Difference % Change
U.S. Chamber of Commerce $132,067,500 $144,496,000 -$12,428,500 -8.6%
PG&E Corp. $45,460,000 $6,280,000 $39,180,000 623.9%
General Electric $39,290,000 $26,400,000 $12,890,000 48.8%
FedEx Corp. $25,582,074 $16,370,000 $9,212,074 56.3%
American Medical Association $22,555,000 $20,720,000 $1,835,000 8.9%
AARP $22,050,000 $21,010,000 $1,040,000 5.0%
PhRMA $21,740,000 $26,150,520 -$4,410,520 -16.9%
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $21,007,141 $23,646,439 -$2,639,298 -11.2%
ConocoPhillips $19,626,382 $18,069,858 $1,556,524 8.6%
American Hospital Association $19,438,358 $18,347,176 $1,091,182 5.9%
Boeing Co. $17,896,000 $16,850,000 $1,046,000 6.2%
National Cable &
Telecommunications Association		 $17,710,000 $15,980,000 $1,730,000 10.8%
National Association of Realtors $17,560,000 $19,477,000 -$1,917,000 -9.8%
Verizon Communications $16,750,000 $17,680,000 -$930,000 -5.3%
Northrop Grumman $15,740,000 $15,180,000 $560,000 3.7%
AT&T Inc. $15,395,078 $14,729,673 $665,405 4.5%
United Technologies $14,530,000 $8,100,000 $6,430,000 79.4%
National Association of Broadcasters $13,710,000 $11,090,000 $2,620,000 23.6%
Pfizer Inc. $13,330,000 $25,819,268 -$12,489,268 -48.4%
Southern Co. $13,220,000 $13,450,000 -$230,000 -1.7%

First, it’s worth noting that that among these top 20 lobbying organizations, two-thirds (65 percent) of these organizations spent more on lobbying in 2010 than they did in 2009.

But more importantly, it’s worth peeking under the hood of these numbers and seeing what it means to spend eight or nine figures on lobbying.
Last year was certainly not a gold rush for The Chamber of Commerce, which accounts for four percent of all lobbying. Mostly, I suspect they’ve been playing quite a bit of defense, trying to shape intellectual environment by spinning narratives and doing everything they can to advance a free-market, pro-business perspective.

If you take a look at one of the Chamber’s quarterly lobbying reports from last year, you should be impressed at the length of the thing. The first quarter report runs 92(!) pages.

Here are the listings from a sample page, listing the Chamber’s lobbying on a single issue, category: “ENG – ENERGY/NUCLEAR”:

H.R. 3246/ S. 2843, Advanced Vehicle Technology Act of 2009 H.R. 3534, Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009 H.R. 5320, Assistance, Quality, and Affordability Act of 2010, including an amendment by Rep. Diana DeGette which would establish disclosure requirements regarding materials used in the hydraulic fracturing process S. 1462, American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 S. 1792, A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the requirements for windows, doors, and skylights to be eligible for the credit for nonbusiness energy property S. 2818, A bill to amend the Energy Conservation and Production Act to improve weatherization for low-income persons, and for other purposes S. 3177 / H.R. 5019 / S. 3434, Home Star Energy Retrofit Act of 2010 S. 3072, Stationary Source Regulations Delay Act S. 3663, Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act of 2010 S. J. Res. 26, A joint resolution disapproving a rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the endangerment finding and the cause or contribute findings for greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act

Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (bill number not yet assigned) Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2011 (bill number not yet assigned)

Draft climate legislation expected to be sponsored by Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman (not yet introduced) Draft legislation to provide incentives to deploy nuclear power (not yet introduced) Various issues relating to the Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act” (draft legislation, not yet introduced) Legislation to reauthorize the “Diesel Emissions Reduction Act” (not yet introduced)

NHTSA Proposed Rulemaking on Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for New Medium- and Heavy-Duty Fuel Efficiency Improvement Program (see June 14, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 113, Docket No. NHTSA-2010-0079) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone (see January 19, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 1, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2005-0172) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on Identification of Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials That Are Solid Waste (see Januaray 2, 2009, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 107, Docket No. EPA-HQ-RCRA-2008-0329) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters (Boilers MACT) (see June 9, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol 75, No. 110, Docket ID: EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0058)

General issues including: policy for storing nuclear waste, the Department of the Interior’s moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, DOE Loan Guarantees for Rare Earth Elements, and Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (specific legislation not yet introduced)

Or similarly, here are the listings for “CSP – CONSUMER ISSUES/SAFETY/PRODUCTS”

H.R. 1521, Cell Tax Fairness Act of 2009 H.R. 2271, Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 H.R. 2309, Consumer Credit and Debt Protection Act H.R. 2221, Data Accountability and Trust Act H.R. 690 / S. 144, Modernize Our Bookkeeping In the Law for Employee’s Cell Phone Act of 2009 H.R. 3458, Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 H.R. 2267, Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act H.R. 3924, Real Stimulus Act of 2009 H.R. 3126, Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 H.R. 6038, Financial Industry Transparency Act of 2010 H.R. 4173, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, all issues pertaining to Title X, the Consumer Protection Bureau H.R. 5777, To foster transparency about the commercial use of personal information, provide consumers with meaningful choice about the collection, use, and disclosure of such information, and for other purposes (BEST PRACTICES Act) H.R. 1346 / S. 540, Medical Device Safety Act of 2009

S. 139, Data Breach Notification Act S. 43, Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act of 2009 S. 773, Cybersecurity Act of 2009 S. 1490, Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2009 S. 1192, Mobile Wireless Tax Fairness Act of 2009 S. 788, m-SPAM Act of 2009 S. 1597, Internet Poker and Game of Skill Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act of 2009 S. 3155 / H.R. 4962, International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act S. 3480, Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 S. 3386, Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act S. 3742, Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2010 S. 3579, Data Security Act of of 2010

Legislation Regarding Offline and Online Privacy (draft released by Rep. Boucher)

What impresses me is the sheer range of issues on which the Chamber is lobbying. The Chamber has the resources to make sure that every time a piece of legislation comes up that touches on some aspect of the broader business community, it can get in to see the right folks to explain why a particular piece of legislation would be good or bad for business, and help people on the Hill to “improve” legislation in a way that the Chamber approves of. There’s something to be said for being ubiquitous, I’m sure.

General Electric, third on the list, also has a similarly expansive quarterly lobbying report at 35 pages, covering an impressive range of issues. Again, pulling from the Center for Responsive Politics, here are the areas on which General Electric lobbied in 2010:

Issues

Issue Specific Issues No. of Reports*
Defense 26 39
Fed Budget & Appropriations 23 34
Taxes 20 33
Finance 17 24
Transportation 13 19
Railroads 13 17
Copyright, Patent & Trademark 10 17
Radio & TV Broadcasting 11 16
Trade 9 14
Telecommunications 4 11
Health Issues 9 11
Energy & Nuclear Power 9 11
Environment & Superfund 7 8
Clean Air & Water 4 8
Aviation, Airlines & Airports 5 6
Banking 6 6
Labor, Antitrust & Workplace 3 6
Medicare & Medicaid 5 5
Aerospace 3 5
Advertising 4 4
Law Enforcement & Crime 3 4
Torts 2 4
Retirement 2 4
Roads & Highways 1 4
Science & Technology 3 4
Foreign Relations 1 1
Government Issues 1 1

Yes, General Electric is a major conglomerate and an important part of the American economy. But again, one can’t help but be impressed by the range of issues on which GE is lobbying. It clearly wants to be part of the debate on just about everything.

Institutions like the Chamber, GE, and others are permanent parts of the Washington policymaking community. They are not part of a gold rush, and they are certainly not going away.

More broadly, if you look at the top 20 spenders on lobbying for 2010, it turns out that they represent $524 million in expenditures, or about 15 percent of all lobbying expenditures. There are about 15,000 organizations that have hired lobbyists in Washington, but the distribution of expenditures is highly skewed: a handful of large organizations (mostly companies and business groups) dominate.

From this vantage point, lobbying in 2010 looks a lot like lobbying in 2009: Mostly dominated by a handful of large important companies and business lobbying groups who want to have a say on a wide range of issues, and more broadly, to ensure that any conversation that might impact on them does not happen without them.

Introducing Wingnut Watch

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This is the inaugural edition of a new P-Fix feature entitled “Wingnut Watch,” which will appear each Wednesday.  I’d like to take a few moments to explain why we are doing this.

It’s our belief that the conservative movement, and through it, the Republican Party, is on an ideological bender at the moment that has become one of the primary obstacles to any sort of bipartisan effort to address the country’s most pressing problems.  It’s hard to say exactly when this bender began. There has always been a hard-core conservative faction in the GOP that opposes any cooperation with the partisan “enemy,” that deplores most of the bipartisan domestic policy accomplishments that have occurred since the Great Depression, and that counsels Republicans to seek political victory by polarizing the electorate as much as possible.

Not since the 1964 presidential campaign, however, has the conservative movement been so radicalized, or so dominant in the GOP.  The wingnut right’s rise to power is in part attributable to an ideological sorting out of the two parties over the last thirty years, but also to the persistent belief—crystallized by the policy failures and corruption of George W. Bush’s administration—that lack of strict fidelity to “conservative principles” and complicity in “big government” were preventing the GOP from consolidating a majority coalition in the electorate.  This faith in a “hidden majority” favoring extremism is common to ideologues of all stripes, but has gone viral among conservatives since 2008, thanks to the virtual conquest of the GOP by the Tea Party Movement (the latest incarnation of the party’s conservative “base”) followed by a smashing midterm election victory.

At this point, a vast array of issue positions and perspectives considered exotic until very recently have become common among conservative opinion-leaders and Republican pols alike: economic troubles are always the result of “big government” and excessive taxation and regulation; global climate change is a hoax designed to create a rationale for government takeovers of businesses; centrist market-based approaches to universal health coverage once associated with moderate Republicans are “socialist” efforts to destroy private-sector medicine; the Second Amendment is designed to enable “patriots” to prepare for armed resistance to “big government;” the constitutional jurisprudence of the last seventy-five years should be overturned in favor of Gilded Age limitations on the federal government;  states should be able to nullify federal legislation; treaties, alliances and international law threaten U.S. sovereignty; safety net programs represent an immoral “redistribution” of income; progressive taxation and/or taxation of income is incompatible with economic growth; a return to the gold standard is advisable—it goes on and on.

A superficially confusing feature of contemporary radical conservatism is the projection of extremism onto the opposition, which has led not only conservatives but many “neutral” commentators in the mainstream media to blame ideologues and partisans on both sides of the barricades equally for polarization and gridlock.  Without question, there are “moonbats” on the left who can rival the “wingnuts” of the right in terms of policy extremism, ferocious opposition to bipartisanship, subscription to conspiracy theories, and policing of politicians according to ideological litmus tests.  But at present, there is no comparison between the political power of the radical left and right.  There is no “triangulation” permitted by Republicans against the hard right, and rarely any public grousing in question of the wisdom and values of the Tea Party Movement.  Those who identify with the GOP orthodoxy of just a few years ago are ruthlessly attacked and systematically exposed to primary challenges, regardless of the impact on Republican general election prospects.

While some on the Democratic left are bitterly angry with the policies and political strategies of the Obama administration, they’ve had remarkably little impact on rank-and-file voters, much less elected officials, and there is nothing remotely like Fox News as a propagator and enforcer of ideological and partisan unity. Moreover, the radical left’s claim that the political center is a dead end for Democrats has been heavily dependent on the wingnut right’s efforts to undermine bipartisanship and paint all Democrats as leftist.

So those who favor pragmatic progressivism have a special interest in understanding, and if possible, bringing to an end, the current extremist trend on the right.  This column will pursue the former in hopes that it will encourage the latter.

But I’m not interested in conducting a carnival sideshow that cherry-picks and mocks radical conservatives who do not have any actual political power.  I won’t follow the birthers and the white supremacists, won’t indulge in Nazi analogies, and won’t assume that every raving from the lips of Glenn Beck has been internalized as marching orders by Republican politicians.  The degree of craziness in the conservative mainstream right now is large enough that exaggeration is unnecessary as well as unfair.  And where conservatives do try to exert some control over their more delusional comrades, I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

Next week’s column will include, among other things, a preview of the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, which used to be one of the primary vehicles for hard-right vetting of Republican pols (particularly presidential candidates), but which has now, in a revealing sign of the times, become suspect as insufficiently intolerant of diversity and dissent.  Stay tuned.

Are Lobbying Expenditures Really Leveling Off?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Roll Call is reporting today that annual Washington lobbying expenditures dipped slightly in 2010, marking the first time since expenditure data became public in 1996 that the amount of money has not increased. The decline was small: from $3.6 billion to $3.5 billion (according to CQ MoneyLine). But it’s worth asking: does this mark some kind of leveling off of lobbying in Washington?

Some background: there has been a remarkable increase in lobbying expenditures since 1998, when a mere $1.44 billion was spent on lobbying. More organizations have come to Washington, and in particular more companies are spending more money on lobbying. OpenSecrets.org has the history, and there’s been roughly a steady 7 percent annual increase in lobbying since 1998.

If there truly is leveling off, it would be a remarkable development. But I’m skeptical.

One possibility is that more reports will be trickling in late, and this early report will turn out to be an underestimate.

A more likely possibility is that the reporting is inaccurate. Organizations and companies may be reporting less lobbying in response to the Obama administration lobbying rules, which create all kinds of hurdles for former lobbyists who want to serve in the administration. In 2008, OpenSecrets counted 14,214 registered lobbyists; in 2010, it counted just 12,484 – a decline of 12 percent.

There is good reason to believe that a lot of lobbyists have increasingly decided it was better not to register, or even just slightly adjust their portfolios and work schedules so that they technically didn’t meet the definition of a “lobbyist” under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The Senate Office of Public Records, which keeps track of these registrations and reports, is perpetually understaffed and not well-equipped to go after anybody.

If this is the case, it’s a shame, because it means that by unnecessarily demonizing lobbyists, the Obama lobbying rules may have actually made the practice of lobbying less transparent by encouraging fewer lobbyists to register and publicly file reports.

Of course, it’s also possible that with the passage of heath care and financial reform, as well as the breakdown of climate legislation, the big lobbying dogs have less reason to be active, and with two years of gridlock ahead, it’s possible some interests realize nothing is going to get through, so why waste the money? But both health care and financial reform have major agency rulemakings ahead, and gridlock may actually require more lobbying grease.

Still, if it is a leveling off, I suspect it’s only a temporary one. As I argued in my Ph.D. dissertation on the growth of corporate lobbying (which accounts for about two-thirds of all lobbying expenditures), “More and more companies are discovering that Washington matters to their business, and those who do are sticking around and increasing their political capacities. As a result, corporate lobbying activity is likely to continue to expand for the foreseeable future, with large corporations playing an increasingly central role in the formulation of national policies.”

There’s simply too much at stake, and still for many large corporations, the amount of money they spend on lobbying is still a rounding error on their annual budgets (and much less than they spend on advertising or R&D). Rather, I suspect more and more companies will continue to realize that the reality is they can’t afford not to be lobbying.