issue: Politics

The Big Misconception About “Deem and Pass”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at TNR, congressional expert Sarah Binder provides a very useful and detailed explanation of the procedures the House will go through this weekend in dealing with health reform. There will be (assuming things go as planned and Democrats have their votes) four separate votes: one on a Republican motion to recommit the rule for consideration of the reconciliation bill, one on the rule itself, one on a Republican motion to recommit the reconciliation bill, and one on the reconciliation bill. If the first or third motions pass, or the second or fourth votes fail to pass, health reform will have been defeated, at least for the moment if not forever.

But it’s the vote on the rule that will (assuming the Rules Committee goes in the direction Speaker Pelosi has indicated is likely) “deem” the Senate health care bill as having been enacted. This “self-executing rule” is what all the yelling and screaming on the Right is about. But since everybody understands what’s going on, it is fundamentaly erroneous to say that the House is trying to avoid a vote on the Senate bill. The vote on the rule is a vote on the Senate bill, and will have exactly the same effect as an explicit vote on the Senate bill, no more and no less.

That fact obviously does raise the question of why the House leadership is utilizing the “deem and pass strategy,” since anyone voting for the rule is actually voting for the Senate bill. I can’t answer that question, but presumably this basically meaningless distinction matters to at least one House Democrat. But in any event, the conservative charge that the House is going to enact the Senate bill without voting on it just isn’t true, and is simply part of the fog Republicans are trying to spread over the fact that by the end of this process (again, if all goes as planned), majorities in both Houses will have twice approved health reform.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Progressives and Poker

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s been some interesting talk going on this week involving a post mortem assessment of “the Left’s” strategy on health reform, particularly in terms of the ultimate emptiness of threats from progressive House Democrats that they would vote against any bill that didn’t include a “robust” public option.

Glenn Greenwald argues that progressives have once again exposed–and possibly even increased — their “powerlessness” within the Democratic Party. Chris Bowers challenges the premise by arguing that progressives did secure significant changes in the Senate bill, most notably the agreement to “fix” it, which certainly wasn’t the path of least resistance.

Meanwhile, Armando of Talk Left has compared the lack of leverage of progressives over items like the public option to the success of the labor movement in forcing concessions on the “Cadillac tax.” And Nate Silver has responded by arguing that progressive threats didn’t work because they weren’t credible in the first place.

I think everyone in this debate would agree that it’s generally a bad idea in politics to make threats you are entirely unwilling to carry out, but the real division of opinion is on whether such threats should be tempered or in fact intensified. But Nate makes one point that bears repeating: the political value of aggressiveness and posturing can and often does get exaggerated.

It feels good to assert that progressives just need to be tougher — perhaps even to the point of feigning irrationality. These arguments are not necessarily wrong — a reputation for being tougher bargainers would help at the margins — but it misdiagnoses the problem on health care. The progressive bloc failed not because of any reputational deficiency on the part of the progressives but because their bluff was too transparent — they claimed to be willing to wager enormous stakes (health care reform) to win a relatively small pot (the public option). That would have been beyond the capacity of any poker player — or activist — to pull off.

I’ve never much liked the strain of progressive analysis that endlessly promotes “fighting” and “spine” and “cojones” as the answers to every Democratic political problem. Sometimes “brains” or “heart” are more important, and moreover, if politics is reduced to a willingness to project brute force, the bad guys are going to win every time; it’s like getting into a selfishness competition with the Right — we’ll never win. But in any event, however you feel about the Will to Power theory of politics, Nate’s right, people aren’t all stupid, and macho posturing by progressives when it doesn’t make sense isn’t going to convince anybody. Poker playing is a relatively small and overrated part of politics. Real conviction and strategies based on conveying those convictions to friends and potential friends are the best building blocks for successful strategy.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Wait Is Over

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It took longer than expected, but the wait was worth it. The CBO score for the Senate health care reform bill and amendments that the House will vote on this weekend is now out (well, in leaked form anyway) and the numbers, at first glance, look good for reform’s prospects.

According to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the legislation got slapped with a price tag of $940 billion over the next decade, more expensive than the Senate version, which makes sense since expanding coverage is one of the fixes the House wants to enact. But the CBO reportedly said the legislation would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade and $1.2 trillion the decade after that — steeper deficit cuts than the Senate bill had. As Ezra Klein summed it up, “that’s more deficit reduction than either the House or Senate bill, and more coverage than the Senate bill.” Hoyer noted that it’s the biggest deficit reduction act since the 1993 Clinton budget.

It’ll be interesting to see how the bill achieves that goal. There had been word in the last 24 hours that the excise tax on Cadillac plans — something labor unions had opposed — had to be tweaked to make sure the legislation met its deficit-reduction aims. Will a more robust excise tax on high-end plans weaken labor’s support for the bill? One thing is certain: with the release of the CBO’s numbers, moderate Democrats concerned about the fiscal impact of the bill can now rest easier and support it.

One wait is over, but another one begins. With the official release of the CBO score later today, the clock officially begins on the 72-hour window that Democrats had promised to give members before voting on the legislation. This pegs the vote for Sunday — though Republicans have promised to pull out all the stops to delay the process.

Erick the Red

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s been a lot of buzz, mostly in the progressive blogosphere, over the news that the proprietor of the notable right-wing RedState blogging site, Erick Erickson, of Macon, Georgia, has been given a perch on a new CNN show hosted by John King.

Most of the talk has featured some of Erick’s more colorful utterances, particularly his description of Supreme Court Justice David Souter as, well, a child molester who also enjoys carnal knowledge of certain barnyard animals, and his reference to First Lady Michelle Obama as a “Marxist harpy.” As a fairly regular reader of RedState, if only to get the juices going on slow days, I can say I’m most impressed with the casual cranky extremism of Erick’s stuff on a day-in, day-out basis, and particularly his bully-boy determination to play a role in Republican primaries around the country. His obsession, for example, with the defeat of Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, a pretty conventional conservative by most standards, has long since passed Carthago delenda est levels and must be viewed as a matter of sheer ego, if not a clinical disorder. The sheer-ego interpretation finds support in another recent Erickson encyclical, wherein he judiciously gave Mitt Romney a partial indulgence for his endorsement of Bennett upon the news that the Mittster had also endorsed RedState favorite Nikki Haley, a candidate for governor of South Carolina (in the real world, Romney predictably endorsed both for the obvious reason that they both endorsed him in 2008).

Last month I spoke at a municipal association meeting in Georgia, and was asked by a lot of people there how seriously Erick, a city councilman in Macon, was taken by national political types (much as Georgians used to ask me the same question about Newt Gingrich when he first exploded on the national scene). Seems he was already letting it be known that he was entertaining various national media offers, and was about to go big-time. I have a hard time begrudging any blogger a shot at mainstream media exposure. But it’s a sign of the times that CNN filled a mandatory conservative slot with a guy like Erick, who seems to alternate between moods of blind rage and smug triumphalism, and who (like me) also has a face made for radio.

We’ll see how ol’ Erick handles the transition to a national audience composed of people who don’t already agree with him. But he couldn’t have been happy with CNN’s press release, which lauded him as a spokesman for small-town values “who still lives in small-town America.” This will not go over well in Macon, a proud old city whose metropolitan area has a population of close to a quarter million people.

Underdogs Have Their Day in Colorado

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Another day, another angry right-wing challenge to “establishment” Republicans once thought to be very conservative. In Colorado, the two parties held precinct caucuses accompanied, as always, by a straw poll among candidates for statewide office. On the Republican side, prohibitive front-runner for the Senate and former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton ran almost exactly even with self-styled Insurgent from the Right Ken Buck, a district attorney who’s an ally of famed immigrant-baiter Tom Tancredo.

Other than her backing of a controversial ballot measure to relax Colorado’s draconian tax limitation law, Norton’s main sin seems to be her friendship with John McCain, also under attack from the Right.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff actually beat appointed Sen. Michael Bennet in the caucus straw poll. This, however, was no surprise; Bennet is a political newcomer while Romanoff has deep roots among the party activists who attend these events.

Neither straw poll is necessarily predictive of what will happen in the primaries for the Senate that will be held in August. On the Democratic side, it’s noteworthy than the senator whose term is being filled this year, current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, didn’t win the caucus straw poll in 2006, and still went on to win the primary handily.

But if nothing else, the Colorado results kept underdogs alive, and on the Republican side, confirmed that this will be a difficult year for anyone with the dreaded “E for Establishment” label.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/writetomikek/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The 2010/2012 Endorsement Game

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the important sideshows in the 2010 campaign cycle is the intervention of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates in current GOP primaries.

Sarah Palin has received considerable attention for endorsing Tea Party favorite and libertarian scion Rand Paul for the Senate in Kentucky over Mitch McConnell’s buddy Trey Grayson, and also for endorsing her old running mate, John McCain, in his fight with right-wing talk show host and former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

Mike Huckabee has been more aggressive in his endorsements, mainly by supporting candidates who endorsed him in 2008. Huck struck gold by getting out early in support of Tea Party/conservative icon Marco Rubio’s challenge to Charlie Crist in Florida — long before Rubio began crushing Crist in the polls. Beyond that, Huck has endorsed controversial gubernatorial candidates in two early 2012 caucus/primary states: Lt. Gov. Andre (“Stray Animals”) Bauer, and Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats. The latter is an especially interesting endorsement; if Vander Plaats upsets former Gov. Terry Branstad (who is closely affiliated with Mitt Romney supporters in that state) in the Iowa gubernatorial primary in June, Huck will be in good shape to repeat his 2008 victory in the Iowa Caucuses.

Like Huckabee, Mitt Romney has kept his endorsements so far limited to 2008 allies (with the exception of John McCain). Those include front-running California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and longshot Alabama gubernatorial candidate Kay Ivy. But two recent Romney endorsements (again, of people who endorsed Mitt in 2008) have drawn national attention: embattled incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah (a Romney hotbed, for obvious reasons), for whom conservatives have long knives out, and then state Rep. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a big favorite of the right-wing blogosphere.

Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, after doing the Right thing by endorsing conservative Doug Hoffmann in a red-hot New York special election last year, announced he would eschew further interventions in competitive Republican primaries. But he made an exception for John McCain, presumably after ensuring he would receive cover for this step from Palin and Romney.

If Hayworth manages to beat McCain, he won’t owe any 2012 candidates a thing. But there are plenty of other competitive primaries later this year where the presidentials haven’t weighed in, and the chess game of endorsements will be very interesting.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The Furor Over “Deem and Pass”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ridiculous attention that the media — cued by the GOP — lavished on process in general and budget reconciliation in particular:

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Replace “reconciliation” with “deem and pass” and the same post pretty much applies to today. “Deem and pass” is the procedure by which Democrats are reportedly planning on using to pass health care reform, allowing House members to “deem” the Senate bill passed while voting on the bill fixing it. The reasoning is that this would enable House Democrats to say that they didn’t technically vote for what they see as a flawed Senate bill. Let me repeat that: they’ll be voting for the Senate bill but can claim that they didn’t vote for the Senate bill. Really, what could go wrong with that strategy?

Republicans have pounced, and the media have been right there with them. Today’s Washington Post headline: “House Democrats’ tactic for health-care bill is debated.” From a New York Times on the “controversy”: “Democrats struggled Tuesday to defend procedural shortcuts they might use to win approval for their proposals in the next few days.” Clearly Dems did not think through the politics of this move.

But its head-slapping idiocy notwithstanding, is “deem and pass” really all that controversial? Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, hardly a lefty advocate, calls out Republicans for their hypocritical rending of garments over its anticipated use for health reform:

In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.” That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration. I don’t like self-executing rules by either party—I prefer the “regular order”—so I am not going to say this is a great idea by the Democrats. But even so—is there no shame anymore?

Steve Benen sums up my thoughts on the latest demonstration of GOP faux outrage and media complicity nicely:

Let me get this straight — the single biggest story in the political world yesterday was over consideration of a House procedure, used many times before by both parties? Republicans decided they don’t like “self-executing rules” anymore, so the matter dominated the discourse?

As with the moronic furor over reconciliation, the same dynamic is at work: a relentless GOP messaging machine that puts process ahead of substance — canny on their part because it’s the process, rather than the policy, that voters are fed up with; a tone-deaf Democratic caucus (They really thought that adding a layer of complication to the process was what health care reform needed? Really?) and feckless communications operation that seems to perpetually be on the defensive; and a mainstream media expertly played like a piano by the GOP.

Misanalyzing Democratic Divisions on Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

We’ll soon know the fate of health care reform legislation in Congress. But win or lose, the retrospective analysis of the health reform fight, and particularly the Obama administration’s overall strategy, will go on for years. That’s why I think it’s important to refute some questionable interpretations right now, before they are incorporated into the unofficial history of the debate.

Today Peter Beinart posted an article for The Daily Beast that treats the last-minute skirmishing among Democrats over health reform as the final stage in a two-decade-long battle between Clintonians and progressives, which Barack Obama brought to a conclusion by choosing to move ahead despite Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. This decision, Beinart says, changed Democrats “forever.”

Beinart’s piece is something of a pinata: it can be whacked from any number of directions. Most obviously, he mischaracterizes the current, and actually very limited, conflict among Democrats about what Obama should have done after the Brown victory. Yes, you can find a few self-described Democratic pundits (and he names virtually all of them) who have argued that Obama should have folded his tent or (somehow) pursued a bipartisan, incremental health reform proposal in the wake of Massachusetts. But the idea that the polling pair of Doug Schoen and Mark Penn, or longtime eccentric Pat Caddell, speak for the entire “Clintonian” tendency in the party is completely absurd. More typical and certainly more relevant are TDS Co-Editor William Galston (whom Beinart treats as a major foundational thinker for what he calls the “DLC types” in the party) and Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC’s think tank during all the battles Beinart describes) president Will Marshall, who have avidly backed Obama’s decision on both philosophical and practical grounds (here and here).

If you look at the actual conflict among Democrats in Congress, “no” or possible “no” votes in the House nearly all fall into two categories: nervous Democrats from very tough districts, who do not neatly fit on one side of some intraparty ideologicial spectrum, and more importantly, the “Stupak Democrats” who are focus on abortion policy. By and large, “Stupak Democrats” aren’t “Clintonian” in any meaningful sense of the term; many are very liberal voters on economic issues, and some, in fact, profess to be upset by the absence of a public option in the Senate bill and/or the presence of an insurance premium tax which many unions don’t like. To the extent that they reflect any intra-party conflict of an enduring nature, the “Stupak Democrats” represent the losing side of a debate over abortion that pre-dated the DLC/progressive battles and has little or nothing to do with them.

At least a few actual or potential Democratic defectors on health reform do so strictly from a progressive point-of-view, on grounds that the Senate bill, even if it’s “fixed” via reconciliation, merely ratifies the tainted health care status quo.

And so long as the Clinton brand is going to be thrown around in this discussion, it’s worth noting that the single most crucial modification of Obama’s campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate, which Hillary Clinton championed. The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obama’s Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.

Equally implausible is Beinart’s claim that Obama’s decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic “left” as opposed to the “center.” Yes, most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic “centrists”) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. That’s because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view, and surrender as politically calamitous as well. But as anyone who has been paying attention should know, many, perhaps most, on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did, and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.

And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinart’s analysis: his assumption that “partisanship” and “bipartisanship”–or as it puts it elsewhere, a Rovian “base mobilization” strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style “crossover” strategy–are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party, leading to the conclusion that Obama has now, once and forever, chosen the former over the latter. For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years, the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude, in fact, as his characterization of the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay “The Politics of Evasion” as urging Democrats to “move to the right”).

It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t “choose” partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obama’s many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete, but by a conviction that he could best achieve “crossover appeal” in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP. It’s not clear this strategy will work in 2010, but it might well work in 2012 and beyond, thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course. In any event, he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and “base mobilization,” and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated can’t be shoehorned into Beinart’s scheme.

Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous. But it wasn’t really a hard choice given the circumstances, and it certainly didn’t resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make “forever.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Civil Disobedience for Republicans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I know, I know, paying attention to anything Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) says is a bit lazy, since she offers up irrational outrages on a near daily basis. But her remarks suggesting that Americans don’t have to comply with health care legislation if it’s enacted via procedures she doesn’t like really do blaze some new trails for the American Right — or at least trails not pursued since the early 1960s, when segregationists urged noncompliance with Supreme Court decisions and civil rights laws.

Here’s Bachmann flirting with jail-time in defense of the great American principle of unregulated private health insurance, or whatever it is she’s standing for:

If they pass the bill legitimately, then yes, we have to follow the law — until we repeal it. But if they pass it illegitimately, then the bill is illegitimate, and we don’t have to lay down for this. It’s not difficult to figure out. So if for some reason they’re able to get their votes this week and pass this 2,700-page Senate bill — if they get it, trillions of dollars is what it’s gonna cost, when we didn’t vote on it, we need to tell them a message: That if they get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything — with anything. And you can’t say you voted on a bill when you didn’t, because it’s fraud. But we are not helpless here. We are not helpless, there are things that we can do.

What Bachmann is thundering about here specifically are reports that the House may vote on a reconciliation bill to “fix” the Senate bill, and then by a Rules Committee provision “deem” the Senate bill itself as having passed the House via efforts to amend it. Turns out the “deem and pass” strategy was used by Republicans during the Bush administration to enact a debt limit increase — never a popular vote — so there is, ahem, some bipartisan precedent for the procedure. And for all the talk about its sneakiness, it should be remembered that it is being considered not because of some substantive concerns about a “fixed” Senate bill, but because House members fear the Senate will just celebrate House passage of their bill and not bother to get around to the “fix.” In other words, it’s all procedural mumbo jumbo that’s unrelated to real health care reform. Any House member voting for the “fix” is, in fact, going to be held responsible by Republicans for supporting “ObamaCare,” so conservatives are being more than a little disingenous in claiming that “deem and pass” is some sort of devilish trick to avoid accountability.

In any event, the courts are where such matters should be thrashed out, not the streets. And by suggesting that her own view of “deem and pass” as representing “tyranny” should trump the law of the land, Bachmann is taking a fateful step towards the revolutionary posture that her Tea Party allies have been hinting at all along.

I’m reminded of an incident back in Georgia some time ago when Congress had enacted a tax bill that imposed a state-by-state volume limitation on the use of tax-exempt financing for private development projects. I was part of a state government team that designed Georgia’s system for implementing this law, and after a public briefing on the new rules in one locale, a local development official replied: “We appreciate y’all coming down here to explain all this, but we think we’ll just use the old system.” We decided not to humiliate the guy by pointing out that the IRS wouldn’t exactly let him “use the old system,” but instead informed him of that privately.

I hope someone informs Michele Bachmann and her listeners that she doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are “valid.” And if she’s willing to go to the hoosegow to resist ObamaCare, there are quite a few other Americans who think the supremacy of law is a rather important principle who will be happy to accomodate her.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Biden, Israel, and the Aftermath

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here’s a lesson in how political optics and poor timing can conspire to exacerbate diplomatic squabbles into really big deals.

Last week, Vice President Biden went on a trip to Israel. He was nominally there on a goodwill visit to reinforce the strong ties between the two countries, particularly as George Mitchell, the administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, sought to reengage the Israelis and Palestinians in indirect diplomacy.

Biden’s trip started well. He did a press conference with PM Benjamin Netanyahu and proclaimed America’s “absolute, total, unvarnished” commitment to Israeli security. Then he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on March 9, writing in the guest book that Israel is the heart, life and hope of the world’s Jews and that it saves lives every day, before laying a wreath and lighting a candle on behalf of the administration. So all’s going swimmingly, right?

Then, this little bombshell fell: Israel’s Interior Ministry announced that 1,600 new housing units would be built in East Jerusalem. The Obama administration has long pushed for a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank as a prerequisite to peace talks, a position that Will Marshall and I backed in this opinion piece just before Obama was inaugurated.

The announcement turned the trip on its ear — Biden delayed attending a dinner with Netanyahu and issued this uncomfortably harsh statement: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units,” saying that it “undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.” It was a tough but necessary statement – as I’ve written before, the administration must “restore America’s credibility as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Biden’s statement is testament to that. Had Biden not been in the country when this news broke, the tone coming from D.C. would have been more muted.

Privately, Biden has reportedly been even more blunt. The fallout continues to be ugly — Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. claims that U.S.-Israeli relations are at their worst in 35 years. Things will heat up this week in the U.S. as AIPAC‘s annual conference is scheduled. Will the White House snub them?

It has been quite a storm, and one that might be traced to internal Israeli politics. The Interior Ministry — the department that approved the settlements — is controlled by a far-right religious party and could have timed the announcement to embarrass and out-flank Netanyahu during such a high-profile visit.

Assuming so, it worked like a charm — the move forced the Obama administration into an uncomfortable position, derailed any semblance of peace talks for the time-being, and put Netanyahu on the spot to reiterate his strong support for Israel building settlements wherever it wants.

Where do we go from here? Frankly, this is going to be a difficult one to recover from. The White House should channel its No Drama Obama persona and remember that that’s the most constructive long-term role it can play, even when internal Israeli politics try to derail the process.  The Obama administration should continue to view itself as an honest broker and retain a cool head in marshalling Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table, making it make clear to the Palestinians that they shouldn’t use the flap as an excuse to give up on talks.

Empty Threats

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the political world prepares for what appears to be Last Stop Week on health reform, conservatives seem astonished that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing ahead for final enactment of legislation passed by both Houses last year, instead of folding their hands and fleeing in terror. They are particularly incensed that Democrats aren’t being shamed or frightened by the prospect of–gasp!–a poisoned partisan atmosphere in Washington. Here’s how Julie Mason of the conservative Washington Examiner presents the threat:

The White House claims it’s above worrying about the politics of health care — they just want a bill passed this week.Good thing, because politics in Washington could become a lot more ferocious and partisan, whether their plan flies or not.

“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Even in the current, highly partisan atmosphere, it can get a lot worse.”

Sorry, Brian & Julie, you are wrong. It really can’t get much worse. And for that, conservatives have no one but themselves to blame, if they actually even care.

Just to cite the most obvious example, there were many moments over the last year when the White House and congressional Democrats might well have significantly changed health reform legislation in exchange for just a few Republican votes (in fact, they made unilateral concessions in the Senate again and again simply to keep the possibility open). And after the loss of the 60th Senate vote last month, had Republicans offered any suggestions other than complete repudiation of the bills already enacted by a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, Democrats would have snapped them up instantly. But in an atmosphere where long-held Republican ideas on health reform like the individual mandate were suddenly being denounced as socialist or even fascist by the Right, no serious offers were forthcoming, unless you think such “ideas” as sweeping away state regulation of health insurers via mandatory interestate sales is “serious.”

So let’s not hear any empty threats about Republican “partisanship.” For better or worse, the GOP made a clear and collective decision last year to take partisanship to the max on every conceivable front, and they have been quite successful with that strategy in a nilhilistic sort of way. But there are no arrows left in that particular quiver.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The New Yorker Goes Nuclear

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this week’s New Yorker (subscribers only), Hendrik Hertzberg wades into an issue that has taken up increasing bandwidth in our climate and energy debates: nuclear energy. Weighing nuclear power’s virtues against its drawbacks, Hertzberg concludes:

Republicans love [nuclear energy] anyway – perhaps because it annoys environmentalists, perhaps on its merits. But they don’t love it as much as they hate taxes, which is how they view cap-and-trade. Obama’s willingness to give nukes a chance won’t win him many of their votes. “It won’t cause Republicans to support the national energy tax,” a spokesman for Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said. But it might win a few of those among them who don’t hate taxes (and science) enough to dismiss global warming as an elaborate hoax. Carl Pope, the executive chairman of the Sierra Club, has said that Obama’s nods to nuclear “may ease the politics around comprehensive clean-energy and climate legislation, but we do not believe that they are the best policy.” But the best, as often happens in our sclerotic political system, may not be among the available choices. As we stumble our way toward an acceptable approach to energy and climate change, the merely good might be the best that we can get.

Its support notwithstanding, Hertzberg’s piece still traffics in the same fear-mongering about nuclear energy’s safety record that has hindered its expansion for decades. “The nuclear industry is one whose record for safety and transparency is very far from spotless, and reviving it will require, besides big spending, nanny-state levels of government regulation,” Hertzberg writes.

In fact, the nuclear industry’s safety culture is so strong that working in the nuclear industry is actually safer than working in manufacturing. Considering the alarmist rhetoric surrounding nuclear energy safety, it might surprise most Americans to know that not one person has died or been injured from a nuclear-related incident in the U.S. (Three Mile Island, that ominous symbol of nuclear risk, did not actually lead to any adverse health or environmental effects.) According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), plant safety performance since Three Mile Island has improved exponentially, with the average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years dropping to nearly zero. Meanwhile, the average number of times that nuclear plant safety systems have had to be activated – a good index of safety performance – is one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.

What about Vermont Yankee, the nuclear plant in the Green Mountain State that was recently shut down by its legislature after tritium was detected in nearby groundwater? While such events demonstrate for some critics the unreliability of nuclear, one could argue it actually shows the improved vigilance and monitoring at nuclear plants – and the continuing hysteria among public and politicians over even small amounts of radiation. According to NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, such leaks – which have been found at other plants – do not constitute a public health threat. “In the grand scheme of radiation, it is well down the scale,” Jaczko said last month, “but in the area of public perception, it takes on greater significance.” According to an NRC study in 2009, “These pipe leaks have been of low significance with respect to public health and safety and the environment.” Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency has called tritium one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits low levels of radiation and leaves the body quickly. (For more perspective on the health effects of the Vermont tritium leak, check out this post from Rod Adams’ indispensable Atomic Insights blog.)

Hertzberg’s piece adds one more voice to a growing chorus of acceptance among liberals that nuclear energy needs to be a part of the energy mix if we are to address climate change. There’s no getting around it: We need to stop using coal and replace it with low- and non-carbon emitting sources. Wind and solar will certainly have a role in that transformation, but they simply can’t be scaled up to meet our energy needs at the moment or for the next couple of decades. Nuclear, on the other hand, is here, it works, and it doesn’t emit carbon. Based on those facts, one would expect a stronger push from progressives eager to battle climate change. But in the current climate, grudging acceptance might be the best that we can get.

Trading Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For the past year, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has been the Obama administration’s equivalent of the Maytag repairman—a capable official with nothing to do. That is about to change.

As part of a broader push for job creation, the president yesterday unveiled an ambitious strategy for doubling U.S. exports over the next five years. Key elements include $2 billion more in export financing, an easing of export technology controls and a new Cabinet office to promote sales of U.S. products abroad. Obama also picked W. James McNerney, CEO of Boeing—one of America’s export champions—to chair the President’s Export Council.

The flurry of activity around trade is belated but welcome, since surging exports have been one of the few sources of job growth lately. It may also put to rest lingering doubts about Obama’s commitment to expanding trade.

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama sounded economic nationalist themes and indulged in ritual NAFTA-bashing. He even vowed to reopen that treat to get a better deal for U.S. workers, deeply alarming Canada and other trading partners worried about mounting protectionist sentiment in the United States.

But if Obama’s new push is reassuring to pragmatic progressives, anti-trade activists are donning their battle gear. Lori Wallach, president of Global Trade Watch, recently told Bloomberg News that the Obama administration must deal with the import side of trade to create U.S. jobs and increase innovation.

Obama yesterday invoked America’s economic travails to short-circuit a family squabble among progressives over trade. “We are at a moment where it is absolutely necessary for us to get beyond those old debates…Those who once would oppose any trade agreement now understand that there are new markets and new sectors out there that we need to break into if we want our workers to get ahead.”

In another positive development, House New Democrats this week released a trade agenda of their own. It emphasizes support for small business exports, the need to crack down on intellectual property theft, and, echoing a key PPI theme, the strategic benefits of expanding trade and economic opportunity across the Middle East.

Both the president and the New Dems call for efforts to rekindle progress on the stalled Doha round of global trade talks, and perhaps most controversially, for closing the deal on pending bilateral trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. This is bound to provoke a reaction from anti-trade Democrats who see trade as a threat to U.S. jobs and wages. They have a powerful ally in the new House Ways and Means Chairman, Rep. Sandy Levin, a longtime trade skeptic.

Trade is not a panacea for America’s job woes. But as Obama and the New Dems understand, lowering foreign barriers to trade is integral to any credible strategy for U.S. economic growth and innovation. It’s also essential for the United States to resume leadership in forging a rules-based global trading system to keep everyone honest and prevent countries from adopting mercantilist strategies.

Finally, and most important for the long-run, boosting U.S. exports is also critical to re-balancing the global economy. Just as we export more and import less, Asian export powerhouses, especially China, need to import more and spur domestic consumption. Obama’s trade initiative is a small but vital first step toward moving world flows of trade and finance toward a sustainable equilibrium.

False Friends

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today’s big whoop in the manic conservative drive to kill health care reform is a Washington Post op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen urging Democrats to abandon reform and work with Republicans on “bipartisan” proposals like “purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage,” and so on and so forth.

Now normally I don’t like to get into the motives or personality of people making political arguments, but in this case it’s unavoidable. The only reason anyone on earth is paying any attention to the views of Caddell and Schoen on this subject is that, as they note prominently in the WaPo piece, they used to work as pollsters for Democratic presidents (Schoen for Clinton, though it was really his business partner, Mark Penn, who had the White House account, and Cadell way back in the Carter administration). But the impression they give of being good Democrats who have finally spoken out in exasperation at the folly of health care reform is completely false. Schoen has never been much of a loyal Democrat; his latest enthusiasm has been encouraging a third party. And Caddell has a history of cranky eccentricity dating back at least a few decades. As Jon Chait points out, both of them have become fixtures on Fox News recently.

They are entitled to their opinion like anyone else, but Schoen and Caddell should check their worn-out Party Cards at the door before they write a piece repeating Republican talking points on health care reform.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Texas Revisionism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarrassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).

Check this out:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.

For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

Don’t know if the instruction on the important role of the NRA will include in-class Eddie Eagle appearances, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The revisionism does not, of course, only pertain to relatively current events:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.

“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.

The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

It’s long been a common ploy for Christian Right advocates to insist on the “Christian roots of the Constitution” as a way to marginalize the church-state-separatist legacy of Jefferson and Madison, and limit the protection of religious liberty to Christians (and we are talking about people with a rather rigid view of what constitutes a “Christian,” with the President of the United States or pro-choice Catholics often not qualifying). The elevation of Confederate leaders into a position of moral equivalency with Lincoln also has an old and unsavory history, as anyone who grew up in the Jim Crow South (as I did) can tell you. But it’s arguably not surprising to see such travesties gain ground in a state whose current governor has been known to flirt with antebellum theories of nullification and absolute state sovereignty.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Devil’s Advocate

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today’s strange quasi-political news is that Tiger Woods has turned to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to help manage public relations for his comeback to the professional golf tour. Fleischer last made national news by becoming the spokesman for college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and earlier represented Mark Maguire and (as they were getting rid of quarterback Brett Favre) the Green Bay Packers, powerfully unpopular clients all.

Ari’s rise to become the hottest ticket in toxic waste management ranks right up there with AIG’s bonuses as a talking point for those who argue that the world is ruled is operated by a malevolent demiurge rather than a just God. But perhaps, as he showed in the White House, he does have a unique talent for combining mediocrity with mendacity, and can protect his embattled clients by boring the news media into submission by repeating lies in a manner designed to induce a trance-like stupor.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.