issue: Regulatory Reform

Phil A. Buster and Democratic Regrets

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In an interesting argument over at OpenLeft about the biggest mistake recently made by Democrats, Chris Bowers suggests that fighting Republican efforts to gut the right to filibuster back during the “nuclear option” debate of 2005 had truly fateful consequences:

[N]ot allowing Republicans to destroy the filibuster back in 2005 is the biggest mistake made by not only President Obama, but by the Democratic trifecta as a whole (and, I admit, my biggest mistake too). This would have resulted in a wide swatch of changes, including a larger stimulus, the Employee Free Choice Act, a better health bill (in all likelihood, one with a public option, and completed in December), an actual climate / energy bill, a second stimulus, and more. If Democrats had tacked on other changes to Senate rules that sped up the process, such as doing away with unanimous consent, ending debating time after cloture is achieved on nominations, eliminating the two days between filing for cloture and voting on cloture, and restricting quorum calls, then virtually every judicial and administration vacancy would already be filled, as well.

I agree with the general argument that Democrats who got all nostalgic about Senate traditions in 2005 when Republicans were threatening to eliminate filibusters against judicial nominations were not thinking strategically. In particular, those who cheered the Schoolhouse Rock-inspired “Phil A. Buster” ads run by the progressive Alliance for Justice would now probably cringe at the memory.

But for the record, it’s important to remember what was actually going on in 2005, in the Republican effort to force Senate floor votes on Bush judicial nominations. The GOP argument was not against filibusters tout court, but against judicial filibusters. And their argument was that such filibusters were unconstitutional on grounds that they violated the provisions requiring Senate advice and consent for judicial nominations. Indeed, the “nuclear option” they threatened was simply a ruling by the vice president, as presiding officer of the Senate, that Rule XXII governing the terms for ending debate was unconstitutional with respect to judicial nominations. Ending filibusters altogether was never on the table, barring some see-you-and-raise-you Democratic tactic of offering Bush his judges in exchange for a more radical step towards majority rule in the Senate, which was never seriously contemplated.

Sure, Republicans have had some fun over the last couple of years quoting Democrats who made pro-filibuster comments in 2005, and it’s true that some Democrats didn’t try very hard back then to make the specific case for judicial filibusters (a case that could have been made on grounds that lifetime appointments to the federal bench require greater Senate scrutiny than the routine legislation that Republicans now routinely block, creating a virtual 60-vote requirement for Senate action). But Democrats need not spend too much time regretting the failure to take advantage of an opportunity that never really existed in 2005.

Photo Credit: displacedtexan’s Photobucket

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Explaining Inequality Trends: Pretty Simple?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

James Kwak, coauthor of the new financial crisis book 13 Bankers, recently sought to explain his thesis “in 4 pictures.” And impressive pictures they are. But I’ve been particularly struck by one of them — this chart, from a paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, showing the close correspondence between deregulation trends on the one hand and the ratio of financial sector wages to private sector wages on the other. My reaction to the chart was essentially, Huh. Those trend lines look like the basic income inequality trend line.

But to my knowledge, no one has really made this point since the chart has circulated widely. Certainly no one has tried to illustrate it.

Maybe people just lack my whiz-bang PowerPoint and Excel skills, or maybe I’ve actually had an Original Thought. But take a look at the chart I created, which overlays a trend line showing the share of income received by the top one percent (the black line) on top of the Philippon-Reshef chart. The trend line comes from the widely cited work of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who used IRS data to look at the incomes of the very rich:

I’ve argued before that I think the Piketty-Saez top-share trend line overstates the recent rise in income inequality, but I don’t see much reason to doubt the basic U-shape of the trend since the Great Depression. For all of the consensus around the basic inequality trend, there’s surprisingly little agreement or understanding as to why it looks the way it does (a major theme of Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal). Could it really be as simple as the extent of financial regulation? Every analyst bone in my body says this is too easy, but…but….

Of course, saying it’s all financial regulation trends isn’t necessarily inconsistent with Krugman-esque arguments that it’s all about changes in cultural acceptance of inequality.  Maybe financial regulation flows from public attitudes about inequality.

Anyway, interesting — no?

Reforming Government: Obama’s Next Task

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Public trust in the federal government, Congress and the political parties is scraping rock bottom, the Pew Research Center reports today. The findings don’t invalidate what President Obama and the Democrats have done over the past year, but they do underscore the need for a new direction.

According to Pew’s Andrew Kohut, only 22 percent of Americans trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. Anger at Washington has intensified and, most important for progressives, the public seems to be souring on activist government. “…[T]he general public now wants government reform and a growing number want its power curtailed,” he says. The important exception is regulation of Wall Street, which Americans continue to favor by nearly 2-1.

Obama’s first year was dominated by the economic emergency and the Herculean task of passing a landmark health care reform. The administration had no choice but to spend prodigiously to prevent a general financial collapse and pump up a stricken economy. If you think the polls look bad now, imagine how much worse they’d be had Obama failed to take decisive action on the economic front.

The health care push may have been the domestic equivalent of a war of choice, in that Obama could theoretically have deferred it until the economy recovered. But it was the right choice for a president with large reserves of political good will, and for a Democratic Party finally given undivided control of the federal government and a mandate to tackle big problems.

There’s no denying the rising public backlash against government intervention and spending, though it probably has as much to do with lingering economic anxieties as what Obama and the Democrats have been doing. In any case, public sentiment for a smaller federal government has risen, while Democrats’ favorable ratings have tumbled 21 points to 38 percent, about the same as the GOP’s, says Pew. At the same time, the poll also shows that voters aren’t hobgoblins of consistency. Even as they complain about the influence of special interests, 56 percent also say government does not do enough to help average Americans.

Progressives shouldn’t lose too much sleep over the Tea Partiers, who are hardcore conservatives and extreme libertarians. But independents are another question. The Pew study confirms the trend of recent elections, which saw independents from Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts abandon Obama’s winning 2008 coalition. This portends a difficult midterm election for Democrats, since independents seem highly motivated to turn out in November and, according to Kohut, express strong preferences for Republican candidates in their district.

What can progressives do to staunch the defection of independent voters? They should pass financial reforms, reduce home foreclosures and get as much of the bailout money back as possible. But the main emphasis for the rest of the year should be on stimulating economic innovation and growth. They should pay particular attention to relieving regulatory burdens on entrepreneurs and new enterprises – including onerous paperwork requirements in the new health care law — which are the primary generators of new jobs.

Progressives also must lay the groundwork for serious deficit reduction and entitlement reform next year as unemployment subsides. The Obama administration should press hard on health reform’s new cost containment measures, and produce concrete plans for closing Social Security’s funding gap. It’s vital for them to show they can discipline federal spending, not just raise taxes.

Here the administration can learn from Bill Clinton’s experience. He too faced an electorate worried about public spending and deficits, and skeptical about suspicious of bureaucratic overreach. He not only produced budget surpluses (a feat Obama won’t be able to duplicate), but also gave priority to downsizing and “reinventing” the federal government.

Obama doesn’t need to echo Clinton’s assertion that “the era of big government is over.”  But in this next phase of his presidency, he needs to be as ambitious in reforming government as he was last year in expanding government.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Greening of Massachusetts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Much to Mitt Romney’s chagrin, Massachusetts has been in the news a lot recently as the birthplace of President Obama’s new health care reforms. Despite Romney’s protestations to the contrary, Obama’s ideas indisputably grew out of the reforms that the commonwealth enacted a few years ago.

Now it turns out that Massachusetts is also leading the country in another area that will likely become the subject of intense national controversy later this year: environmental regulation and the quest to build a clean economy. In one of America’s oldest and most traditional states, a coalition of business, policy-makers and nonprofits are leading the way in transforming the American economy – and bringing us closer to a clean, green future.

Massachusetts has a distinctive environment that makes clean energy a particularly bright choice. The commonwealth has unusually expensive electricity (from a lack of indigenous coal or natural gas) and a deregulated power market (where utilities do not own power plants).

Recently, PPI convened about three dozen clean tech industry leaders at the beautiful Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston. PPI’s new E3 Initiative held an event keynoted by Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environment Ian Bowles and also featuring Nick Darbeloff and Peter Rothstein, president and senior vice president, respectively, of the New England Clean Economy Council.

Secretary Bowles recounted for the audience the advances that have taken place under Governor Deval Patrick. Massachusetts has taken the lead in New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative covering all major power plants, which caps emissions at 2009 levels through 2015, after which the cap will decline to reduce emissions 10 percent by 2019. Its efficiency programs have been so successful that the state is on track to cut its energy use by 30 percent by 2020. And under the renewable portfolio standard it adopted they have already exceeded their targets. Massachusetts has also built greenhouse gas emission reductions into the state environmental review process, which is leading to greater private investment in green buildings. The state will also provide utility customers with $1.6 billion in incentives to conserve energy at home, including free energy audits and rebates to purchase more efficient appliances.

National leaders looking to Massachusetts for lessons would do well to keep one thing in mind. Just as muscle needs a skeleton for support, structure and politics both matter for environmental regulation. Soon after Patrick was sworn in, and with the cooperation of Massachusetts’ legislative leaders, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to merge all its energy and environmental agencies (six total) into a single cabinet secretariat with the overall mission of bringing clean energy technology to market, curbing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving energy efficiency.

With that structure in place, Bowles and his team went about achieving their agenda by closely cooperating with legislative leaders in the state House and Senate. Too often American states (or the federal government, for that matter) have seen promising environmental issues die on the vine, as special interests whittle ambitious legislative proposals into pilot projects that fail to achieve the economies of scale and systemic effect necessary for change. In Massachusetts, however, Bowles and his team began working very closely with legislative leaders in 2007, soon after Patrick took office. With a lot of elbow grease and diplomacy, Massachusetts enacted six major energy and environmental laws achieving broad energy reform, greenhouse gas reduction and comprehensive oceans management.

In advance of the battles certain to come this summer in Washington about a carbon control system, the E3 Initiative was proud to showcase Massachusetts’ pioneering work on achieving a clean economy. With smart ideas, proven economic benefits and steady political talent, we can see results instead of gridlock.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mnsomero/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Will the FCC Go Nuclear?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The D.C. Circuit Court ruled yesterday (PDF) that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doesn’t have authority over the Internet. Back in 2007, Comcast was filtering the Internet connections of users who were suspected of using file-sharing programs and eating up a lot more bandwidth than expected. The FCC told Comcast to cut it out, under the concept of net neutrality, which required that all packets of data sent over the Internet be treated equally. Comcast challenged the FCC’s right to do that, and yesterday the court agreed with the Philly-based company.

The FCC had argued that it had the right under the authority given to it by Title I of the Communications Act of 1934, which established the FCC. According to the FCC’s argument, Title I empowered the commission to regulate Internet connectivity as an “ancillary” authority, even though it wasn’t explicitly charged to do so by Congress in the act (which, after all, was passed more than half a century before the World Wide Web was launched). The D.C. Circuit Court said no, Title I does not give the FCC that authority. While the decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court, which could reverse the ruling, even proponents of a strong net neutrality role for the FCC admit the decision is pretty solid.

While the case is technically a “win” for Comcast (their challenge was upheld) some observers say it could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Now the FCC could claim authority to regulate Internet communication under its Title II powers. Regulating the Internet under Title II, which covers “common carriers,” would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to adhere to net neutrality as a common carrier requirement. This means that physical providers of an Internet connection to your house (in other words, traditional phone and cable companies that have evolved into ISPs) would be limited in their ability to manage the information going over their networks — unable to prioritize some data over other data — much as phone companies have no control over whom you talk to over your phone line.

This is apocalyptically referred to as “the nuclear option,” as it would result in a radical change in how telecommunications firms view Internet connectivity. Title II would require them to behave more like utilities. Proponents of this idea say its potential upside would be increased competition in services provided over that connection. Critics, including the ISPs themselves, say the potential downside is that ISPs could lose a big incentive (profit maximization) to invest in our residential broadband connections, which are lagging behind other countries like South Korea.

In its own discussions of a National Broadband Plan, the FCC has avoided the Title I vs Title II debate. However, with this ruling, the appeals court has forced the commission’s hand. The best solution for the FCC could be to go before Congress for clarification of its role in regulating the internet. As our friend Brian Wingfield points out, it’ll be a tech lobbying fight, but the FCC would have a better chance with a Democratic Congress than it’s likely to have in the courts.

The appeals court has ruled that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate Internet, but it may also lack the ability. The communications sector is changing rapidly. Some ISPs are acquiring content creators, and others are providing mobile services only previously seen in Dick Tracy cartoons. The FCC was established to regulate what was then regarded as a “natural” telephone monopoly. What’s needed is either an FCC with a dramatically transformed mandate or — maybe better — a new entity dedicated to protecting the environment for continuous innovation on the Internet.

Why an EPA Rule for Traditional Pollutants Matters for Greenhouse Gases

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the sexy pollutant. “Traditional” pollutants like sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrous oxides or NOx (which are themselves GHGs, though their climatic effects are not the basis for their regulation) get less attention, with media, legal, research, and to a lesser extent regulatory attention devoted to GHGs. These pollutants have much greater health impacts than GHGs, however. Moreover, how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates them under the Clean Air Act (CAA) might shed some light on how they will regulate GHGs under the same statute.

Unfortunately, the EPA’s master plan for new  SO2 and NOx regulations, the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), is in legal limbo. In North Carolina v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit found such substantial flaws in the rule that it vacated CAIR completely in 2008, before backing down somewhat and directing the EPA to fix a number of problems. In the meantime, the rule has remained in effect — CAIR is zombie regulation.

Nobody likes zombie regulation. It’s hard to determine environmental benefits and for industry to determine costs, and markets in tradable allowances don’t work very well when the future structure of those markets (and even whether they will exist) is unclear. Whatever the EPA does to address the court’s concerns with CAIR is therefore likely to be an improvement on the current situation.

The EPA is expected to release the required revisions to CAIR soon. Some of the issues the court identified with CAIR in its original form are that compliance deadlines for it and other regulations do not match, and that the EPA exceeded its authority by making changes to the congressionally created Title IV trading program for SO2.

The largest problems for the court, however, were with the trading programs created or modified by CAIR. How the EPA addresses these concerns will be the most interesting part of the new CAIR and will shed the most light on how far the EPA can go in using emissions trading methods under existing CAA authority — something that may be important for future GHG regulation.

Will Emissions Trading Survive?

 

The original CAIR created new interstate trading programs for SO2 and NOx or expanded existing ones. The court, however, cast real doubt on whether these trading programs are viable. Specifically, the court held that the CAA authority (NAAQS) used by the EPA requires actual reductions in emissions from each state that contributes to pollution in downwind areas (it is largely this interstate pollution “transport” problem that CAIR is designed to address). The trading programs in the original CAIR would have reduced pollution from upwind states, but free trading among states meant that the EPA could not guarantee that every upwind state would reduce its emissions.

It’s hard to see how the EPA can comply with the court’s interpretation of the CAA here and keep interstate trading as part of the revised CAIR. If you have interstate trading, you reduce costs of compliance but at the expense of certainty over where emissions will be reduced. It is just this certainty that the court claims the CAA requires. Trading may survive in the form of purely intra-state markets, or the EPA may devise some hybrid regulation that includes some command-and-control elements that would force reductions in emissions in all upwind states.

The structure the EPA chooses — and whether the court deems it permissible — is important. There is some chance that the EPA will choose (or be forced) to regulate GHGs under the NAAQS program. If the EPA does go down this route, CAIR and the courts’ treatment of it will provide the precedent for a GHG trading system. Can such a system be implemented nationwide under the CAA if only intrastate trading is permitted for other pollutants? If GHG regulations are not driven by contributions to other states’ pollution problems, the EPA might be able to distinguish them from the CAIR regulations. But SO2 and NOx are the best examples by far of emissions trading programs under the CAA. If the new CAIR kills or guts these programs, the precedent for any GHG trading scheme – at least under the NAAQS – will be weakened.

The proposed new CAIR should be released by the EPA in the near future. The character of the emissions trading programs it creates will tell us a lot about the future of the Clean Air Act for greenhouse gases and beyond.

This item is cross-posted at Weathervane.

Knowing What You Paid For

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

‘Tis the season to fill out your tax forms — and, for many Americans, to complain about all the tax dollars that disappear into the maw of what they see as an indifferent government. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Democracy‘s Ethan Porter has a great idea to increase Americans’ sense of investment in their government:

[L]et’s offer individual taxpayers a clear breakdown of what they’re getting in return for their taxes. The IRS should provide individual taxpayers with a receipt. To be as accurate a reflection of spending as possible, such a receipt would be mailed at the beginning of the year following the April 15 deadline. So, for example, I would receive a receipt for my 2009 tax return, filed in 2010, in the beginning of 2011 estimating where my money has gone thus far, and will go until I file my next return. Soon after, the president would unveil a new budget resolution, and, as April loomed, the process would begin again.

By necessity, such a receipt would be an estimate, broken down according to what each taxpayer had paid the previous April. (Only the portion of the budget consisting of money generated by individual taxpayers would be deconstructed for each person.) The receipt would necessarily represent a bit of an oversimplification–the federal budget is a monstrously complicated thing. For our purposes, comprehensibility, as opposed to comprehensiveness, should be prized. The text should be simple, and the accompanying graph should be clear. We have the capacity to do this already: Today, numerous outside groups, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities probably the best among them, produce material along these lines. But they don’t do so in accordance with the federal government, and their work isn’t distributed to every taxpayer.

If done right, a receipt could have powerful and lasting consequences. It would make clear the enormous amount of goods and services provided by the government.

Even as conservatives have launched a largely successful crusade against taxes over the last couple of decades, public demand for services that the government provides hasn’t waned. The result is a disconnect: anger at the level of taxation — which has already been generally decreasing since the 1970s — and yet a steady expectation of goods and services from a government that relies on taxpayer money to sustain itself.

Considering the misconceptions the public has about where their taxpayer money goes, Porter’s idea could be a great corrective to the conservative narrative of a government squandering its tax dollars or prioritizing areas of less importance to them. As Porter points out, Americans tend to overestimate how much of the money goes toward things like welfare and foreign aid. When confronted with the fact that those numbers are actually small compared to other expenses like national defense and Social Security, taxpayers may see the check that they’re dropping in the mailbox every spring in a whole new light.

It’s no secret that the U.S. is going to have to find new ways to cut spending or raise revenues to steer us off our current path of fiscal disaster. An informed taxpayer might be more realistic about the hard choices necessary on both sides of the budgetary ledger. A receipt for our tax dollars will make for a less inflamed electorate — and, by extension, plant the seeds for a more reasonable fiscal politics.

The EPA and GHGs: Sometimes the Little Things Matter Most

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Major pieces of legislation from the Hill, blockbuster rulemakings, and Supreme Court cases get all the policy headlines. Sometimes, though, small things can make just as much of an impact. Last week’s completion by the EPA of a proposed revision to an internal memo — the Johnson Memorandum — could be an example of this, though it looks like it will be most notable for maintaining the status quo. Still, it’s interesting to look at what impact it could have made (and may yet, if the final version is different).

The memo and today’s revision have to do with a bit of Clean Air Act (CAA) arcana: which polluters have to get preconstruction permits to build new plants or modify existing ones? This question seems superficially to be interesting to only the most pedantic of CAA wonks, but the answer has real effects for the cost and effectiveness of policy.

These permits are a big deal. They are expensive and time-consuming to get and require facilities to install the “best available control technology” (BACT). Since the EPA will very shortly regulate greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions, the question has pressing relevance. The EPA’s controversial “tailoring rule” is aimed at minimizing the impact of these permit requirements (called PSD in CAA lingo) by restricting them initially to larger sources. But the even more immediate question of when those large sources have to get permits is determined elsewhere in the Johnson Memo. (For more on how these pieces fit together, see the chart here.)

The EPA has traditionally required only emitters of pollutants subject to actual control under the CAA to get PSD permits. This means that emitters of pollutants that are only reported, not regulated, don’t have to get permits. It also means that emitters don’t have to get permits until regulation actually forces action; regulation just being announced isn’t enough. The Johnson Memo, released in 2008 by the Bush-era EPA and named for then-EPA Administrator Steven Johnson, confirmed this traditional approach.

Now that the EPA is about to regulate GHGs, the agency is reopening this issue. If you thought that the 19-page Johnson Memo was a comprehensive treatment, get ready for the 77-page reconsideration. In the proposed version of reconsideration (released last year), the EPA claims its preferred option is to stick with the traditional approach. This would probably result in permit requirements for GHGs beginning in January 2011, according to Administrator Lisa Jackson’s letter to Congress last week. But the proposed reconsideration mentions alternatives, such as a permit requirement when an endangerment finding for a pollutant is made, or even when reporting is required. If one of these options is chosen by the EPA in the final reconsideration, emitters will require permits now (since GHGs are subject to reporting in 2010 and an endangerment finding was made in December).

As Jeff Holmstead of Bracewell & Giuliani discussed at RFF’s Clean Air Act event last week, this timing issue really matters for emitters. If an emitter has a new plant or modification awaiting a permit, whether a permit application is processed before or after GHGs become part of the BACT inquiry is very important. Uncertainty makes planning difficult. Combined with the uncertainty surrounding the tailoring rule, GHG emitters are unsettled and unhappy. Unsettled and unhappy industries tend to sue agencies and lobby Congress. Environmentalists also care about timing. They want GHGs to be a part of the permit process as soon as possible, and are likely to exert pressure of their own.

Since the Johnson Memo and the new reconsideration of it are EPA interpretations of its own statutes, they are very hard to challenge in court (they are entitled to Chevron deference). This makes pressure on the agency directly (through the comment process) or indirectly (through Congress) the most likely avenues of attack from either side.

Since the proposed reconsideration confirms the existing approach, I think it will be relatively unchanged in its final form. If the EPA does pursue a change in this policy, however, the effects will be large. This is just one of countless illustrations of how, in Washington as much as anywhere, the little things matter.

This item is cross-posted at Weathervane.

More On ObamaCare/RomneyCare

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here’s something to tuck away in your files on both health care reform and 2012 presidential aspirant Mitt Romney, from Tim Noah at Slate (via Jon Chait). Looking at Romney’s new pre-campaign book, Noah observes:

Romney’s discussion of health reform is, from a partisan perspective, comically off-message. (How could he know what today’s GOP message would be? He probably finished writing the book months ago.) Remove a little anti-Obama boilerplate and Romney’s views become indistinguishable from the president’s. They even rely on the same MIT economist! At the Massachusetts bill’s signing ceremony, Romney relates in his book, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., quipped, “When Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy are celebrating the same piece of legislation, it means only one thing: One of us didn’t read it.”

Noah goes on to mix up some Obama and Romney quotes on health care reform, and challenges the reader to say which is which. Can’t be done.

Back in January, I predicted that Romney’s sponsorship of health care reform in Massachusetts might turn out to be a disabling handicap in a 2012 presidential race, given the shrillnesss of conservative rhetoric about features in Obama’s proposal that are also in Romney’s–most notably, the individual mandate.

Something happened since then, of course, which has been of great value to Romney in protecting his highly vulnerable flank on health reform: Scott Brown, another supporter of RomneyCare in Massachusetts, became the maximum national GOP hero and set off to Washington to try to wreck Obama’s plans. That meant that not one, but two major Republican pols would be promoting ludicrous distinctions between RomneyCare and ObamaCare as though they were actually vast and principled.

But I can’t see this illogical brush-off as working forever. If the Mittster does crank up another presidential campaign, fresh media attention will be devoted to his record and “philosophy” on health care. And more importantly, Romney’s rivals in a presidential race won’t for a moment give him a mulligan on the issue the GOP has defined as all-important. Mitt’s “socialism” in Massachusetts will eventually re-emerge as a big, big problem for him, and arguments that it was just state-level “socialism” won’t quite cut it in a Republican Party that’s moved well to the Right since the last time he ran for president. Before it’s over, they’ll make it sound like he’s the reincarnation of Nelson Rockefeller, money and all.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: A Pragmatic Progressive Argument for Repeal

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the 1990’s, pragmatic progressives led the way in reinventing government. Under the leadership of President Clinton, wasteful spending was cut from the federal budget and new cost-effective strategies were implemented that reduced inefficiencies. However, for all our achievements in the ‘90’s, some of the reforms enacted during those years were less than successful. Today, pragmatic progressives must own up to past mistakes and propose fixes to outdated, ineffective and costly policies. Among those failed reforms is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT).

Mandated by Congress in the 1994 Defense Authorization Act and signed into law by President Clinton, the DADT policy targets for expulsion from the armed services those who have a propensity for, display behavior associated with, or commit acts of homosexuality. It’s important to note that DADT prevented baseless initiation of investigation into a service member’s orientation, which the military’s former policy allowed, and was, in fact, the compromise policy that emerged from President Clinton’s original proposal to allow gays to serve openly in the military.

Opinions and conjecture aside about this compromise in 1993, DADT is plainly in need of repeal now — and support for such a move is rock solid. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and former Secretary of State General Colin Powell have recently joined other active and retired high-ranking military and Defense Department officials in calling for its end.

The support for repeal among military brass underscores the pragmatic value of doing away with the policy. For one thing, the policy has inarguably done harm to our national security efforts. Under DADT, almost 800 “mission-critical” troops have been discharged in the last five years, including at least 59 Arabic and nine Farsi linguists. These unnecessary discharges create additional challenges and risks for our brave young men and women on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, our military continues to face an overall recruiting crisis. DADT unnecessarily limits the pool of potential recruits, including some of the best and brightest young minds we need to win the war on terror and run our military in the decades to come. According to recent estimates, some 4,000 service members each year choose not to re-enlist because of the policy, and 41,000 gay and bisexual men might choose to enlist or re-enlist if the policy were repealed.

Under DADT, more than 13,500 gay soldiers have lost their jobs and medical, educational and other benefits. Many of those discharged are young Americans who enrolled with the promise of a college education and a better life. Others given the boot have served for decades and have lost more than a job — their entire careers have been wiped out, too, because of their sexual orientation.

And then there’s the financial downside of the policy. It costs up to $43,000 to replace a discharged service member. Add at least $150,000 more to that figure for officers and $1,000,000 for Navy and Air Force pilots. If you consider inflation and the cost of additional required training for service members to fight the war on terror, you can imagine the average price tag on this policy has increased — and will continue to increase — significantly over time.

With 75 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, calling for an end to DADT, the political risk to overturning this policy is minimal. In fact, when one considers the size of the pro-equality voting bloc, which includes an overwhelming majority of young Americans, one could argue the benefits greatly outweigh the costs of action on this reform.

Rather than approaching DADT as strictly a cultural or social issue — which is how our conservative opposition would like to define it to inject homophobia in the debate and divide Americans — progressives should also frame DADT as a matter of national security, civil service and fiscal responsibility. Taking up this policy challenge under these terms would reflect our progressive values and “third way” approach — to cut wasteful government spending, focus our national security to fight global terrorism and the wars of the 21st century, reduce unemployment and reward work, and promote national service.

The Tea Party’s Retreaded Ideas

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For all the talk about the Tea Party Movement and its demands that America’s political system be turned upside down, it’s always been a bit hard to get a fix on what, exactly, these conservative activists want Washington to do.

To solve this puzzle, it’s worth taking a look at the Contract From America process — a project of the Tea Party Patriot organization, designed to create a bottoms-up, open-source agenda that activists can embrace when they gather for their next big moment in the national media sun on April 15. The 21-point agenda laid out for Tea Partiers to refine into a 10-point “Contract” is, to put it mildly, a major Blast from the Past, featuring conservative Republican chestnuts dating back decades.

There’s term limits, naturally. There are a couple of “transparency” proposals, such as publication of bill texts well before votes. But more prominent are fiscal “ideas” very long in the tooth. You got a balanced budget constitutional amendment, which ain’t happening and won’t work. You got fair tax/flat tax, the highly regressive concept flogged for many years by a few talk radio wonks, that has never been taken seriously even among congressional Republicans. You’ve got Social Security and Medicare privatization (last tried by George W. Bush in 2005) and education vouchers. You’ve got scrapping all federal regulations, preempting state and local regulations, and maybe abolishing some federal departments (an idea last promoted by congressional Republicans in 1995). You’ve got abolition of the “death tax” (i.e., the tax on very large inheritances). And you’ve got federal spending caps, which won’t actually roll back federal spending because they can’t be applied to entitlements.

My favorite on the list is a proposal that in Congress “each bill…identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.” This illustrates the obliviousness or hostility of Tea Partiers to the long string of Supreme Court decisions, dating back to the 1930s, that give Congress broad policymaking powers under the 14th Amendment and the Spending and Commerce Clauses. This illustrates the literalism of Tea Party “original intent” views of the Constitution; if wasn’t spelled out explicitly by the Founders it’s unconstitutional.

We are often told that the Tea Party Movement represents some sort of disenfranchised “radical middle” in America that rejects both major parties’ inability to get together and solve problems. As the “Contract From America” shows, that’s totally wrong. At least when it comes to policy proposals, these folks are the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, upset that Barry Goldwater’s agenda from 1964 has never been implemented.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bisongirl/ / CC BY 2.0

A Heavy Lift

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

We always knew it would be a heavy lift. When Scott Brown swept away the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate – by taking Ted Kennedy’s seat no less – it seemed like a puckish and malevolent act by the legislative gods. Now, as the endgame draws near, the degree of difficulty only continues to go up.

The problem this time is not the Senate but the House. The plan is for the House to pass the bill that the Senate passed, and for both chambers to then pass a “fix” via reconciliation, which would require only a majority in the Senate.

But since the beginning of the year, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost several “yes” votes on health care. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), a liberal stalwart, resigned January 3; Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) passed away February 8; Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) stepped down on February 28. On top of that, Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA), the only Republican in either chamber to vote for reform, has come out and said he would not be voting for the bill this time around. Add on the Stupak bloc, the group of representatives led by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) who reject the Senate bill on the grounds that its anti-abortion provisions are less strict than in the bill the House passed, and the bill’s prospects become even dimmer.

Just today, more bad news. Initially, with all the departures from the House, including that of Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA), the magic number for Pelosi had at least shrunk to 216. But Deal today said he would stick around until the vote, raising the threshold to 217 again. But there’s more! There have been reports of other previous “yes” votes now wavering as the GOP ramps up its anti-health reform campaign to “spook” Dems: Rep. Shelley Berkley (NV), Rep. Michael Arcuri (NY), Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR).

But anyone expecting less than a full-on blitzkrieg from the right to sway quaking Dems has not been paying attention. The question is: Does that include the White House?

Too Much Inside Baseball

One of the ironies of health reform legislation has been its declining popularity with the public even as it progressed up the legislative chain. As it passed each new congressional hurdle, public opinion dipped. By the time 2010 rolled around (and before Scott Brown), health reform was on the brink of passing, but the victory seemed like it wouldn’t be quite the rout its supporters had hoped, with the bill so damaged in the public’s eyes.

I always thought that this was the result of an overcorrection on the White House’s part from the mistakes of the Clinton administration. The Clinton health care plan floundered because the administration was so ham-handed when it came to dealing with Congress. This White House adjusted accordingly, and played the beltway game to perfection.

But it never learned from another Clinton mistake, which is that it’s not all about the beltway – the ground game matters, too. With a highly mobilized right wing getting its message out to congressional districts, hardcore opponents – the town hall screamers of last summer – came out of the woodwork, inevitably coloring the impressions of the casual political observer. Phone calls started coming in to congressional offices opposing the bill.  Poll numbers dropped.

Meanwhile, the White House, with both eyes on Congress, failed to fire up its own base. Obama held events here and there, but nothing like a sustained campaign to mold public opinion. Without that leadership, the progressives and moderates who knocked on doors for Obama simply weren’t there this time around to match the other side’s intensity. By the time Scott Brown showed up, some lawmakers were all but ready to be done with health care.

And so here we are. President Obama has gone all in, even going so far as to set a date for when he wants the House to vote. He has also assiduously courted iffy Democrats, inviting them over to the White House and no doubt seeking to buck them up. And with news that he’s about to embark on a barnstorming tour to stump for health care, it’s clear that the White House sees the importance of aggressively shaping public opinion and the media narrative.

But will it be enough? Or is it too little too late? And will the progressive grassroots that helped Obama win the presidency be there to neutralize motivated right-wing foot soldiers and Astroturf groups? Or will those GOP robocalls and conservative vehemence ultimately topple unsteady Democrats? It’s a real test of leadership for the president. And as others have rightly pointed out, it’s a test of the progressive base, too.

Some Quick Thoughts on the Rockefeller Proposal

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) today introduced a bill which, if passed, would become the “Stationary Source Regulations Delay Act.’’ This bill, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) proposal that I’ve written about before, would curtail the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the Clean Air Act (CAA). There are major differences between the proposals, however, and I think these are worth clearing up. I suspect media reports will group the two proposals together, even though the practical and political effects will be very different.

First, even though both proposals target EPA CAA authority over GHGs, they are mirror images of each other. The Murkowski proposal would kill the EPA’s endangerment finding for mobile sources (cars and trucks). In the short term, this would block all EPA efforts to regulate GHGs under the CAA, though in principle the EPA could make a new endangerment finding under a different section of the act and go after other kinds of sources. The Rockefeller proposal would leave the endangerment finding and mobile source regulation intact but, as its title indicates, would impose a two-year moratorium on EPA regulation of stationary-source (power plants, etc.) GHGs.

The Rockefeller bill makes much more sense, I think. This isn’t to say I personally support it, just that it addresses concerns over EPA regulation of GHGs much more effectively than the Murkowski proposal. Mobile-source regulation is the one piece of the CAA/GHG process that has broad support. The regulations the EPA plans to finalize this month were a product of compromise with the auto industry last year. All of the comprehensive climate bills I know of leave EPA authority over mobile sources intact. It’s EPA regulation of stationary sources, and in particular requirements for preconstruction GHG permits, that is causing the most controversy and putting the most pressure on Congress. If Congress wants to relieve this pressure then the Rockefeller path is the right one, not Murkowski.

Second, the political differences are obvious though I’m skeptical about whether the end result will be any different. Rockefeller is a Democrat, and while Murkowski has support from some moderate Dems, this new proposal seems pitched more directly at the center-left core of the Senate. Unlike Murkowski’s proposal, it will need 60 votes to pass, but it is probably more likely to get them. Similar bills are being proposed by House Dems.  This makes it much more likely, I think, that the bill will pass one or both houses—though I leave it to more adept vote-counters to make the call.

Even if the bill did pass both houses, it would still have to be signed by President Obama. I cannot imagine the president would sign the bill. It blocks action on GHGs that the president has publically stood behind. Also, and maybe more importantly, the bill would take an arrow out of the quiver of the executive branch. No president likes that. Until and unless that changes—or unless Congress somehow comes up with a veto-proof majority—the Rockefeller bill won’t become law.

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

This item is cross-posted at Weathervane.

Gang of Eight Isn’t Enough

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As an ex-intelligence guy, I’m particularly sensitive to intel’s uncomfortable place in American politics. Because the intelligence community is — by design — inherently secretive, it’s an easy punching bag for politicians looking to score cheap points because they know it can’t publicly respond. Who’s at fault for the Christmas Day bombing? Blame the intelligence community! Need to justify a hard line on Iran in the face of a lukewarm 2007 National Intelligence Estimate? Blame the intelligence community! Who should have stopped the Fort Hood tragedy?  … I think you know where I’m going.

The point is that though the intelligence community needs continued reform, in each of the above cases, it assumed an undue share of responsibility for each incident.

Naturally, then, I got a bit nervous reading that the Gang of Eight — the group of leading members of Congress who are regularly briefed on sensitive intelligence matters — is about to be widened. It follows that increasing Congress’s access to highly classified national security activities will lead to a greater risk of premature public disclosure for political motives.

However, Gang of Eight disclosure reform was necessary in the wake of the post-9/11 dual domestic eavesdropping and torture scandals. If in those cases the Bush administration had informed a wider congressional audience, perhaps the respective congressional oversight committees could have better done their jobs. Because what’s the point of having oversight if there’s nothing to oversee?

It appears as though this deal, which has been worked out but still needs to be passed in the intelligence authorization bill, strikes the right balance between politics, oversight, and national security. In broad strokes, the president would have to notify both intelligence committees that there had been an intelligence disclosure to the Gang of Eight, and provide the full committees with “general information on the content of the finding.” Of course, the devil is in the details — the White House’s interpretation of “general information” will probably differ from the Hill’s.

Even so, here’s the kicker: any one of the eight (theoretically acting on behalf of another committee member) could register opposition to the proposed intelligence operation with the Director of National Intelligence, thereby (hopefully) preempting unnecessary press disclosures.

The end result should create better oversight that pressures the intelligence community to remain within the law, while removing incentive for Congress to go public. Fingers crossed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.

Over the last few weeks, a new narrative has taken hold in health care news: that of a partisan Democratic Party determined to “ram” a bill through Congress. It’s a frame that the GOP has been relentless and disciplined in perpetuating. Some have even taken to calling it the “nuclear option,” which in its previous political incarnation was the name Trent Lott gave the Republican effort in 2005 to change filibuster rules for judicial nominations.

The “nuclear option” as shorthand for budget reconciliation is not only a misnomer, it’s flat-out misleading. Hardly unprecedented, budget reconciliation has been used 22 times since the process was established in 1974. As Jackie Calmes wrote in the New York Times last week, 16 of those times, it was the Republican Party that used it to “ram legislation through on a one-party vote” (at least that’s how House GOP Leader John Boehner describes its use today).

Moreover, reconciliation has been used several times to pass health care legislation. NPR’s Julie Rovner, who has done superb work on the health care story, pointed out that health care provisions ranging from COBRA (it even says so in the name — COBRA stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to changes in Medicare and Medicaid have come via reconciliation.

But efforts by reporters like Rovner notwithstanding, the Democrats have already lost this battle as the media have taken the GOP’s cue and fixated on process. The unwarranted magnification of reconciliation is not unlike the media frenzy over Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” a bit of horse-trading that was hardly unusual in writing bills, but somehow became the equivalent of a legislative high crime by the time the GOP and the media were done with it.

More than any other piece of legislation in recent memory, health care reform has been debated, negotiated, and written under the unforgiving attention of the 24-hour cycle. This is as close a view as the American public has had to the sausage-making in Washington. They don’t like what they see. Republicans are well aware of this, and continue to point the spotlight on the frequently ugly process.

And so we are now at the current pass. One party has made unprecedented use of the filibuster to prevent anything from being done. The other party is now thinking of using a procedural tactic used nearly two dozen times since 1980, including to pass health care legislation, to break the impasse. While there certainly has been more attention on the abuse of the filibuster of late, that the use of reconciliation is even a story is a problem for Democrats. That Democrats are playing defense on a matter of process speaks volumes about their PR ineptitude, the Republicans’ messaging cohesion, and the media’s ongoing failure to go beyond stenography.

Two More Scooped Up in Zazi Case. Where Are Progressives?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Two men who were already in custody, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, were charged (along with Najibullah Zazi) in a plot to attack New York’s subway system. The plot was derailed by federal agents back in September, just days before it was set to be executed.

Details of the plot continued to emerge at the previously scheduled hearing for the two men Thursday when Jeffrey Knox, the assistant U.S. attorney, strongly implied that Medunjanin and Ahmedzay were two of the operatives in the “three coordinated suicide-bombing attacks on Manhattan subways during rush hour.” Knox added that the plot was undertaken at the direct command of al Qaeda’s central leadership. That’s a heavy charge, and I’m normally skeptical of prosecutors making grandiose assertions to attract press attention. But — bin Laden’s direction or no — the fact remains that this was a very real plot with very real consequences.

After three significant arrests, I’ll restate the question I asked the other day: Where are progressives on this one? Yet again, we have a large-scale terrorist plot against a major American target that was successfully thwarted due to the good work and cooperation of our law enforcement and intelligence communities. The civilian court system has already gotten one guilty plea out of the ringleader (Zazi), and he’s continuing to provide intelligence. Progressives should be pounding their chests about a strong victory against a ruthless enemy.

But instead, as Greg Sargent at The Plum Line quotes one Democratic strategist saying, “We’re behaving like the President has a 30% approval rating. On these [national security] issues, Democrats inherently believe no one will believe our arguments” (a quote that admittedly was made before the Zazi guilty plea, though the sentiment still applies).

 

It’s time to snap out of it. I argued before that progressives have to respond to conservative attacks (if they’re brazen enough to criticize the Zazi case…wait a minute, I forgot who we’re dealing with here — of course they’re brazen enough), not on policy grounds, but with forceful rhetoric. National security is an emotional issue for Americans, not a policy one. Using the Zazi case to show our strength and smarts to contrast conservatives recklessness is an argument that continues to resonate. We’ve got great ammo — let’s use it.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99887786@N00/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0