I’ve observed an interesting trend in the last few years: political commentators have started analogizing anti-intellectualism in contemporary politics with the antebellum era Know-Nothing political party. Most recently, Governor Christie did it yesterday in his rant about Congress and Sandy aid, calling out Congress as “know-nothings.” The meme is best illustrated by what Peter Beinart wrote last year in an article titled “GOP Rejects Know-Nothings, Opts for Candidates who Understand Public Policy”:

Until this fall, GOP anti-intellectualism not only seemed alive and well. It seemed to be going wild. George W. Bush—who loved to joke about being a C student—had been more blatantly anti-intellectual than Ronald Reagan. Sarah Palin was even more blatant than Bush. And when Palin decided not to run for president, conservatives rallied around Michele Bachmann (who explained that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States”), Herman Cain (“when they ask me ‘who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan’ I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know”) and Rick Perry (enough said).

Andrew Sullivan then repeated it in his post linking to the article, titled “The Limits of Know-Nothingness.” The problem, however, is that the term “Know-Nothing” doesn’t originate from an anti-intellectualism of the antebellum political party of the same name, but from that party’s sorta-secret nature. In response to questions about the party, the member was supposed to respond, “I know nothing.”  The genesis of the term wasn’t a statement about political intellectualism, either by the party itself or as a derogatory slur placed on the party by others. There’s just no historical connection between the party name and any sort of ignorance of public policy.

Now, throughout American history, the term “Know-Nothing” has been used derogatorily in politics. But again, it was not a charge of anti-intellectualism; it was a charge of nativism. The Know-Nothing Party (later, the American Party) was virulently anti-immigrant in the antebellum era, and to call someone a Know-Nothing in the late 19th or 20th century was to charge them with hostility toward immigrants or hostility toward liberal immigration policies. And while it’s probably true that nativism and anti-intellectualism have some sort of correlation of appeal, it wasn’t the case that the Know-Nothings presented the sort of plain and outspoken hostility to intellectualism that some ascribe to the modern GOP. I mean, their only major candidate for President was Millard Filmore, not exactly an anti-intellectual.

Indeed, you see the nativist angle in many (or maybe most) contemporary uses of the term, such as this Tim Egan piece in the Times last summer, or by Bill Kristol as quoted in this Craig Shirley WaPo piece. Still, I’ve detected a rise in the use of the term as a blanket charge of anti-intellectualism. There’s certainly nothing wrong that — the meaning of words and phrases change all the time. But it’s interesting to see the process occur in real-time, and watch how a historical word slowly drifts from one meaning (the name of a party) to another (a slur based on that party’s positions) to another (a general slur based on the plain meaning, but incorrect, assessment of the party’s name).

I get the feeling that my crazy liberal relatives are going to be all over filibuster reform this weekend. That means, as a general defender of the contemporary Senate, I’m in for a spirited debate, and that’s being charitable.

I have a few new thoughts down below, but first, here’s an annotated catalog of past blog posts I’ve written related to the filibuster that I’ll be reviewing before I enter the combat zone on Thursday.

1. Managers Gonna Manage. Legislatures Gonna Legislate. My basic argument against filibuster reform: 1. The Senate is malapportioned. Removing the filibuster will not ameliorate this, and may exacerbate it. 2 A majoritarian Senate will operate, functionally, like a second House of Representatives. This has real, knowable costs, such as the foreclosing of minority amendments that could carry a floor majority, and the disappearance of the compromise that such amendments now foster. 3. Following from 1 and 2, there’s no ex ante reason to think trading in the status quo Senate for a small, malapportioned House with six year terms would improve American democracy.

2. Polarization and the filibuster. An expanded look at my basic argument against filibuster reform. Plus an explanation of why you can’t simultaneously achieve more partisan compromise and more accountable majority parties under a reformed filibuster.

3. Filibusters and Cloture. Counting up filibusters is really hard. Using cloture motions to do so is borderline folly.

4. Hardball and HARDBALL. The Senate is held together by norms. No matter how much you think people have started playing hardball with the rules, we’re not even close to the hardball people could be playing.

5. Talking about the filibuster. Be careful about how you talk about the term “filibuster.”

6. Deliberations. My argument against falling into the trap of good-government types who want to create a “deliberative legislature.” A deliberative legislature is not one in which people listen to each other thoughtfully reason out arguments and convince people of things. A deliberative legislature is one in in which bills can be iteratively improved by floor amendments that carry the support of a majority of legislators. By the former definition, all legislatures in the history of the world have failed the “deliberative” test. By the latter, the U.S. Senate passes. But the House does not, and neither would a post-filibuster Senate. This is a huge cost of getting rid of the filibuster.

7. In (partial) defense of less democracy. A more theoretical post reacting against popular belief that more democracy = good. Democracy isn’t always best. And don’t confuse democracy and majoritarianism, they are separate ideas. Also, there are many democratic reforms that have proven mediocre, and some anti-democratic reforms that have proven useful.

8. The difficulty of institutional reform. Political reform is really hard. While you always try to install normative values into institutional rules, lots of obstacles stand in the way of success and/or coherence.

9. You tell me it’s the institution, well, you know. We should be skeptics about the vast majority of proposed institutional reforms.

10. Friday Congress blogging: unanimous consent. You need to understand this before you can understand the Senate. Period.

Ok. Now some other filibuster-related thoughts. One thing I’ve never written about at any length is my view on the difference between filibustering legislation, executive branch nomination, and judicial branch nominations. In fact, the most I think I’ve ever said about the topic is two tweets, basically arguing that I would, if given the power, eliminate filibusters on all nominations, and replace them with (potentially very lengthy) time limits on floor debate.  The idea would be to try to balance the interests of intense minorities with the interests of an intense majority. Majorities could absolutely get their nominations through, but only if they were willing to eat the costs of tons of lost floor time when the minority was upset enough to force them to do so. That’s the theory, anyway. Like I said, it was two tweets.

Here’s the mechanics I envision (and this is preliminary, not in rules-speak, and subject to flaws i don’t see): judicial nominations could, of course, still move through the floor by unanimous consent agreements. Likewise, they could also move by getting cloture. But the presumption in considering them would be that, absent a UC or a successful cloture motion, there would be X hours of time for debate, evenly divided. It wouldn’t all have to be used, and it could always be avoided by cloture or UC, but if the minority wanted to spend X/2 hours discussion a nomination, they would have that right. The majority could just sit there and listen — that would be fastest — but could also rise and respond on their own allocated time.

Jon Bernstein was kind enough to take up my idea in a blog post that I highly recommend. His basic concern about it, which I think is real, is that it wouldn’t structure the incentives correctly, and you’d end up in an equilibrium potentially worse than the current state of affairs: what if the minority simply used the new rules to force a full floor log-jam on every single nomination, even in cases where they currently would just allow things through? It’s a real danger, and it’s an example of what Sarah Binder wrote about yesterday in a fabulous and dead-on post over at Monkeycage: we can’t predict the effects of any Senate reform, because so much of the Senate runs on norms. If the reform encourages Senators to start breaking more norms and playing hardball, you can end up going backwards. Please go read her post.

I’m obviously concerned about this with my proposal. But not that worried. Tons of nominations go through all the time right now on UC, and we virtually never see the minority insisting on their post-cloture 30 hours of debate. So I don’t see why, ex ante, we would expect regular use of 30 hours — or 100 hours — of debate granted to all nominations. More likely, it would only occur — if ever — when there really was a nomination that created an intense minority preference against. Or maybe just for every SCOTUS nominee.

One thing that sets me apart from most filibuster defenders is that I don’t really believe the filibuster can be justified in regard to nominations, executive or judicial. And that’s for three reasons: first, I have a basic belief that the President should be able to surround himself with the advisers and inferiors that he wants. If I were a Senator, my normative policy would be to never vote against an executive branch nomination unless I literally though the nominee had a physical or mental disability that prevented them from taking on their job. Second, I think the prerogatives of the Senate should be (and are) on their weakest grounds when dealing with inter-branch issues. I won’t go into detail here, but I think there is a fundamental difference between the Senate in legislative session and the Senate in executive session. Enough so that I think the rules for each should be fundamentally different.

Third, and most importantly, the benefits I see as deriving from the filibuster in the lawmaking arena tend to not apply in the nominations arena. There are no minority amendments to be had on nominations. There are no compromises to be put into a nomination. It’s an up/down vote on an individual, not a bill being crafted among 100 equals. Therefore, the leverage to be gained from the filibuster is purely moving the location of the pivot point for passage toward the minority. In effect, this is the super-majoritiarianism that people complain about, with fewer of the benefits. Now, this is not an airtight case; there’s a strong case to be made the other way, that lifetime appointments to the bench are too valuable to be left to temporary majorities. That nominations do involve bargaining across multiple appointments and across other policy areas. But I’m not, at this point, convinced.

In 2008 in Virgina, President Obama won 53.2% of the two-party vote share (i.e. Obama votes / (Obama votes + McCain votes)) . In 2012, he won 51.5% of the two-party vote share. Where did the  percentage point drop (1.7%) come from?

Virginia has 134 counties and cities.  In 21 of those unit, Obama saw an absolute increase in vote-share percentage in 2012, and in an additional 42 units, his vote-share percentage decreased by less than the 1.7 percentage point decrease, state-wide total. In 71 of the counties/cities, Obama 2012 two-party vote share percentage saw an absolute decrease, including 6 counties/cities where he saw a 5-10 percentage point decrease, and 6 others were he saw a decrease of more than 10 percentage points.

Below is the scatterplot of Obama county-level vote share in 2008 vs. 2012, with a 45 degree line drawn in. Points below the line indicate Obama did worse in 2012 than 2008 in that county; points above the line indicate he did better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few observations:

First, note that the places where Obama saw large decreases from 2008 to 2012 were almost exclusively places where he had already done badly in 2008. In fact, the only two places Obama won in 2008 that he lost more than 4.5 percentage points were Lexington City and Westmoreland.

Second, note that the general trend roughly reflects the outlier trend. The swing was not uniform. Obama did somewhat worse against Romney in McCain ’08 counties, but somewhat less worse in Obama ’08 counties. The places where he did better in 2012 were almost all places he won in 2008.

Finally, note that the outliers are quite small counties; Obama’s 0.8% worse showing in Fairfax County — where there were over 400,000 voters — maters more in an absolute sense than the 10% worse showing in the outlier counties, which combined have only about 130,000 voters.

 

Everyone and their crazy business-magnate uncle is jumping onto the  narrative that Sheldon Adelson and other Super-PAC magnates wasted their money because Romney lost the election. Maybe they did! But here’s five reasons you might want to be skeptical:

1. Winning isn’t everything. Nor is it the only thing. When you spend tens of millions of dollars trying to influence an election, you obviously want your preferred candidate to win. But the binary outcome of the election isn’t the only thing you can, or want, to influence. Your money is also going to affect: the policy issues your candidate raises, the positions on those policies that he introduces into the discourse, what issues he chooses to attack his opponent on, the way the media frames these debates, and so on and so forth. If Sheldon Adelson’s goal was to make sure neither candidate questioned the use of drones or backed the Colorado pot initiative, well, mission accomplished. It’s not like the end goal here is to get a man into the office; the goal is ultimately to influence policy.

2. Marginal effects. If I told you we could increase your candidates’ national vote share by 5% for $100 million dollars, you’d probably say that’s a pretty good return on investment. Whether that 5% gets your candidate over the top by moving him from 46% to 51% , or isn’t quite enough and only gets him from 42% to 47% has no bearing on the bottom line that $20 million can buy a 1% swing in national vote-share. You can’t control other variables that affect the election, so why worry about them? If I bought you a baseball bat that automatically raised your on-base percentage by 20 points, we would never say I wasted my money if you went 0 for 4 the first day you used it. In the long run, your OBP is going up, and we’re scoring more runs.

3. Expected value. Similar to marginal effects. Say I gave you the chance, for $1000, to flip a magic coin I have. If it comes up heads, you get to be President. If it’s tails, you get nothing. You give me the grand, flip, and it comes up tails. Did you waste your money? Of course not. You had a 50% chance of being President! And so it goes with the Super-PACers. For $100 million (or whatever), Sheldon Adelson potentially bought himself a 50% chance (or whatever) of being really influential in a presidential administration. If he estimated that a 50% chance of that kind of influence was worth more than the money he spent, well, that’s just good investing. Note also that the value of such potential influence is highly subjective.

4. The meta game. The world of politics does not end with this election. It’s a repeated game, and the Super-PAC mega-donors are now known to be powerful political players. All candidates — in both parties, up for election or not —- now know that vast sums of money may be spent to help them, or to defeat them. That threat will give the Super-PACers potential influence even if they never spend another penny. The millions spent this fall are going to influence political choices for years, through the implicit threat of future spending.

5. You don’t have complete information. Not only do you not know the motivations of the Super-PAC mega-donors — one man’s waste of money is another man’s treasured memory of being a big shot player in a national election and the potential influence associated with it — but you also don’t know the policy concessions they may have won from either or both of the parties or other candidates or political players. And, as mentioned above, the effects of the money may reverberate for a good long while. More unknowns.

None of this is to say the money wasn’t wasted. It might very well have been! But that’s both an objective claim — if we define it more precisely and specify some parameters — but also a subjective claim resting on a set of value judgements about money and politics. It might be possible to subjectively declare the money a waste.  But to categorically declare the money objectively wasted, at this point, is not an obviously supportable proposition. In some pedantic sense, every penny spent on every losing campaign is inherently “wasted.” But that’s not only intuitively wrong, it’s a quite myopic view of electoral democratic politics.

Here’s the simple chart I always want immediately after a House election, but that I can never find. So this year, i just built it myself. Here’s the district-level data file (2012 House election v2), which also includes some other goodies (like Cook PVI). Enjoy.

My 25-point layman’s guide to getting your politics junkie on today:

In the morning

1) Do not — under any circumstances — turn on your television prior to 6pm. This isn’t specific to the morning, but it has to be first, because it’s absolutely crucial. The only thing worse than the election night coverage on the cable news networks is the election day coverage on the cable news networks. And trailing right behind those two things is the douchebag in your office who watched the Today show on election morning and is now repeating the same drivel outside your cubicle. Don’t be that guy.

In case you are tempted at any point in the day, I’ll save you the time by summing up the coverage for you here: worthless anecdotes about turnout; analysis of rainy weather forecasts that supposedly affect turnout but actually do not; “explanations” of the “science” of exit-polling and election prediction; interviews with senior citizens who voted at 11am in the Midwest; set pieces like “30 years ago this week” about past elections;  meta-narratives about the President’s probable reaction to a 5-seat swing in the House vs. a 15-seat swing; exposés on campaign financing, voter turnout, and enthusiasm; editorials on what the election “means,” whether this is a “change” election, a “wave” election, or a “turnout” election; stories about the parties angling with teams of lawyers to oversee recounts; worries on the left and right about voter fraud and voter suppression; some blair-witch style youtube video showing something allegedly wrong; debates over whether this is 2004 or 1992 or neither; debates over divided government and gridlock; anecdotal profiles about who the independents are voting for; questions about why aren’t there more moderates; polemics on whether the Tea Party will play nice in DC during the lame-duck, whether the Tea Party will be a force in politics for much longer, and whether the Tea Party is actually a party;  and 35 other things that could  be studied with a rigorous methodology but instead will be delivered in the absence (or face) of data, and an equal number of things that should never be studied, period.

Did I mention this will all be delivered to you at a 4th grade comprehension level?

2) Learn the Electoral College landscape cold. There are only 11 states you need to watch (CO, FL, IO, MI, NV, NH, NC, OH, PA, VA, WI). Get yourself knowledgeable about when the polls close in those states, review some recent polling averages, and fiddle around with one of the many online maps to think about different situations. (This NYT tree-branch utility is kind of neat.)

3) Ditto with the Senate landscape. There are only 14 races that are either remotely close enough to have big impacts or are otherwise interesting (MA, IN, WI, CT, VA, ND, MT, AZ, NV, PA, NM, HI, FL, OH, MZ). Learn the candidates and the stakes in each of these. Forget all the rest.

4) Figure out some House bellwethers. Unless you spend your days dealing with the House of Representatives (ahem), it’s hard to be up on all the competitive house races. But it’s a lot more fun to watch returns if you can assess the importance of a given House race result without having to trust Chuck Todd. Throughout the night, there will be a flood of House returns, and if you know that Rhode Island’s 1st district, Kentucky’s 6th district, and Illinois’ 17th district are a lot more important in judging the national result than Rhode Island’s 2nd district, Kentucky’s 5th district, and Illinois 16th district, you’ll be ahead of the game. In the past, this has been a doable-but-arduous task. Two years ago, Nate Silver produced a handy shortcut in the form of a guide; no word on whether such a similar cheat-sheet will be available for laymen this year. (Update: here’s a pretty good one from The Fix). But you can use Cook’s race ratings or RealClearPolitics race ratings or any number of other websites to orient yourself.

5) Make a prediction of some sort — and maybe a bet — but don’t be the “prediction-guy.” Make your prediction public by emailing it to someone (Or heck, post it here in the comments). Here’s mine: Dems pick up a net 12 House seats and Senate control remains exactly 53-47, D’s.  Dems win MA Senate seat but lose MT seat. I like Obama for 290 electoral votes, narrowly losing my home-state Virginia. I also guarantee that either David Gergen or some governor-type (Ed Rendell? Haley Barbour? Chris Christie?) will get on my nerves at some point. And yeah, I’ll bet you a drink that I’m closer than you on the EC total.

The trap to avoid here is turning the whole night into a test of your prediction ability. Don’t be that guy who’s only interested in the NCAA tournament because he’s got seven brackets going and $1000 on the line, but doesn’t really give a shit about college basketball. So keep the predictions light and modest. Guess an EC number, predict House and Senate totals, and call half a dozen races. But don’t go crazy. Face it: you didn’t build (you didn’t build!) your predictions from some proprietary model and a whole bunch of insider information, so your success or failure basically reflects zero on your ability as a forecaster. But your behavior tonight can reflect grandly on your status as a douchebag. So let Nate Silver and the British gambling houses sweat it out; your job isn’t on the line here.

6) “Watercooler” the election. I spend a lot of time at work trying to avoid political discussion — and I work on the Hill! So I understand your general impulse to stay away from your wackier colleagues on Election Day. But it might be the one day of the year when talking politics at the office can generate some positive returns. Especially if you go beyond contemporary politics and talk to people about democracy. Obviously, you have to weed out the cynics who want to lecture you on why they didn’t vote and the angry partisans who can’t imagine who would vote for that idiot and the monologuers who won’t shut up about why our democracy is capital-F-fucked, but if you can weather those storms, you might strike gold.

You’re not looking for anybody specific here, but I recommend finding two people in particular if you can. First: a veteran. Ask him if he ever voted from a combat zone. Then listen. Second, someone who’s run for local office in the past. Ask them what it was like on election day when they ran and how it changed their view of democracy. Then listen. And, of course, if you work with any African-Americans over the age of 60, by all means talk to them about voting and elections. You’re almost guaranteed to get a story worth hearing.

7) Vote. Or don’t. It’s utterly not consequential to the election. But you’ll feel better about yourself if you do. If you need some patriotic inspiration, go read my voting story from last year.

In the afternoon

8) Again, resist any and all temptation to turn the television on. For full explanation, see #1. But remember, they’ll be doing things like using a panel of “experts” to interview David Axelrod for three minutes about who he thinks is going to win the election. You’ve been warned.

9) Figure out who you are going to watch the returns with. People go all sorts of ways with this. I totally respect the people who have to watch alone, in the dark, just them and the TV, like they’re die-hard baseball fans watching game 7 of the world series. But that’s not my scene. Ditto with the election-night-headquarters style parties with you and 200 of your closest friends at a barroom. I think a home get-together is best, preferably with at least one person who shares your politics and one who doesn’t. I don’t recommend getting a ton of people together; think more “friends coming over” than “party” — you want six, not thirty. I also think bringing huge partisans into the mix is a mistake, but strong ideologues can be great if they are not too attached to party labels. Avoid cynics and Euro-philes at all costs. Face it, democracy is the least-worst alternative, and unemployment in parliamentary-systems on the continent is like 15%. Yeah, the Senate is anti-democratic, but so is the veto. Get over it. I don’t want to hear it tonight. And neither do your guests.

10) Get your snack setup straight. This is tricky. It’s not a college football tailgate. It’s sure as hell not a dinner party.  It’s not a BBQ. It’s not having people over for The Game. My suggestion is to go simple and traditional. That means, of course, pizza and beer. Fill in with pretzels or chips. The thing to stay away from is really messy food, since you’re going to want access to your laptop (see below) regularly. So probably stay away from salsa, or guacamole. And as much as it pains my upstate heart, wings are a big no-no. You also want a wonkcave configuration that’s amenable to eating and using a computer. You don’t have to go full-blown dork with TV trays and all that jazz, but figure something out ahead of time, so you aren’t sitting on a really deep couch, balancing your laptop and a plate of pizza on your knees.

11) Learn about a few ballot initiatives. Here’s a nice layout of the major questions. Personally, I’m focused on the following: Maine Question 1 and Minnesota Amendment 1 (legalize gay marriage; ban gay marriage, respectively); Colorado Amendment 64 and Washington Initiative 502 ( both would legalize pot and regulate it like alcohol); California Proposition 34 (abolish the death penalty); and Florida Amendment 6 and Montana LR-120 (ban on public funding for abortion; parental notification for minor abortions, respectively). I can’t really get that jazzed about the various Obama-care related initiatives (such as Florida Amendment 1) because states are going to have plenty of chances to mess with Obamacare if it proves unpopular but little room to maneuver otherwise. The small window in which they can make it unpopular by messing with it is, of course, real, but I doubt that the initiative process will be the main driver of that, given the wide latitude that legislatures and executives will have for implementation decisions. Mostly seems like a political sideshow to me.

12) Forget the governors’ races. Once you’ve studied the Senate races and found your House bellwethers, you might be tempted to start looking into some governor’s races. It’s not worth it (unless your state happens to have a competitive race). Maybe pick one that’s really interesting, but don’t bother trying to master them. Invariably, they won’t affect your life and you won’t think about them again until they start announcing for President in a few years. And there’s no real meta-narrative to consider (aside from stuff like “implementing Obamacare”). Put your energy into learning more about the Senate races.  It makes for much better viewing.

13) Vote if you haven’t yet done so. Or don’t. It’s utterly not consequential to the election. But you’ll feel better about yourself if you do. If you need some further patriotic inspiration, go read my old State of the Union post.

In the early evening, before the first polls close (Indiana and Kentucky 6pm EST)

14) Again, resist any and all temptation to turn the television on. For full explanation, see #1. But remember, they’ll be doing things like making predictions about national turnout levels based on anecdotal interviews at 2 precincts in the midwest. You’ve been warned.

15) Get your laptop setup with the proper tabs open. My setup is going to look like this: a few live-blogs sitting open on the desktop (probably Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, and Five Thirty Eight), an ideological spectrum of other blogs available for quick consult (DailyKos, Instapundit, National Review), the tally-maps from some major networks/papers (probably WP, MSNBC, and Foxnews), and the Virginia official returns site. Anything more than that, and it becomes unwieldy.

16) Arm yourself with the proper printouts. Some things are just better to have in hard copy. If there’s some variant on  Nate Silver’s hour-by-hour House guide form 2010, that’s pretty indispensable, especially if you aren’t uber-familiar with the House terrain. (Update: here’s a pretty good one from The Fix). I also recommend getting some scrap paper ready to use as your own tally-sheet for House and Senate pickups; you can do scratch math on that for the EC too. And a copy of Cook’s House Race Ratings is nice too to have on the table.

17) Get yourself setup on Twitter. I cannot emphasize this enough. Nothing has made following political events more fun in the last 10 years than Twitter. It brings just the right mix of seriousness and humor that democratic electoral politics deserves. Get yourself setup on it and get tweeting. Or just reading tweets. You won’t regret it. Here are a bunch of tweeters I recommend following (for all-around reasons of smarts, humor, and likely volume of tweets tomorrow): @jbplainblog, @speechboy71, @jbouie, @ezraklein, @BrendanNyhan, @conor64, @smouts, @monkeycage, @radleybalko, @pourmecoffee, and, of course, @MattGlassman312. There are hundreds of other good ones too, so find your own!

After the polls begin to close

18) Ease into things.  If you plant yourself on the couch at 6pm, you will be brain-dead by 10:30. This is not college football; it is best enjoyed with an active mind. So turn on the TV, get your prep-work out, but don’t sit down. If you absolutely must be plugged in from the get-go, I recommend cleaning or exercising in the TV room. And for god sakes don’t eat a full sit-down dinner in front of the television. You’ll regret it. Have a light snack and order the pizza for 7:30. Make the returns background noise and a passive activity early on; by 7:30 or 8, you’ll be ready to hunker-down.

19) Pick a cable news network and stick with it. And I recommend making your choice based solely on comedy. Who has the stupidest display board, with the most useless bells and whistles? Who has the most commentators lined up in a bleacher-like tier? Which network is doing live-remotes from the most ridiculous places? Who has the funniest name for their “war room”? The bottom line is that the networks have ceased to be journalistic endeavors, and are now only good for getting raw data or being entertained. Everything else — from play by play to commentary to meta-analysis — is better on the Internets. Like fifty times better.

20) Don’t be afraid to get emotional. For some reason, America spent the 20th century trying to remove political intensity from the practice of actually casting and counting the votes. As recently as 100 years ago, polling places were raucous scenes, complete with bands, rallies, and liquor. Now they are like graveyards. And that carries over a lot of the time to how people adsorb returns. Don’t let it get to you. You’re emotionally invested in either politics or policy; you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise. Don’t pretend we’re counting the votes in a vacuum. Go ahead and cheer.

21) Around 9:00pm EST, call someone who’s only mildly into politics, and talk to them about the elections. Or more precisely, listen to them. Ask them who they voted for and why, and what they think of the emerging results. Don’t offer any opinions, analysis, or commentary. Too many junkies live exclusively in the world of the strategic meta-narrative; it’s both insightful and refreshing to hear people on election night who approach things at face-value.

22) Find out who won local office in your town. Contrary to the indications derived from media coverage, your town and school board elections routinely have a bigger effect on you and your family than anything going on in Washington. It’s bad enough that you don’t know who your state rep is, but it’s unconscionable that you don’t know who’s setting the policies for your kids’ school.  Take the time and find out who won these races, and promise yourself that you’ll have a better knowledge of them next time around. That way, you’ll at least feel guilty two years from now when you say, “Is he the Democrat or Republican?”

Late Night

23) Watch an unexpected victory speech, and an unexpected concession. Obviously, if there’s an uber-upset (like Mandel winning in Ohio or Kerrey winning in Nebraska), find those speeches and watch them live. Otherwise, look for the mild-upsets in Senate races in NV, WV, etc. If Allen West loses, watch him. And if you can find an internet feed of a political amateur winning a House seat, those are solid gold moments.

24) Don’t turn it off until you know who the next President of the United States is, but don’t stay up figuring out the House tallies. Even if you have to fall asleep on the couch, you should wait for the presidency to be called. And that only gets truer as it becomes an issue. If it’s 1am EST and we don’t know who will be president, you will be watching dramatic history. Stay up. On the other hand, unless you’re prepared to stay up all night, the marginal value of waiting each additional half-hour to hear the calls of late House races is really low.  If they can’t call the California and Washington races by 2am EST, it will probably be sometime until they can. Don’t bother.

25) Light up a joint if pot wins in Colorado. Just kidding! Federal law will still make marijuana possession, sale, and cultivation illegal in the United States, and Gonzalez v. Raich will continue to guarantee for the time being that those federal laws are constitutional, regardless of how much money we throw away in the War On Drugs and how many non-violent drug offenders we put in federal prison in the coming years. Think that’s dumb? Me too. But I voted for Gary Johnson. Next time, will you?

Over the weekend, there was quite a firestorm of criticism and defense related to the quantitative modeling of the presidential election and the resulting forecasting, mostly centered around the work of Nate Silver at his excellent blog, FiveThirtyEight. I was genuinely shocked at how much interest the topic generated, and I very much enjoyed the debate, which I consider a very healthy and positive exercise for both the political science and punditry community.

(Sidebar: within the general debate between modelers and pundits, I’m firmly with the modelers. In my view, punditry is nothing more than informal modeling by seat-of-the-pants intuition, anyway. Within the more specific debate between political science models that rely on fundamentals and 538-style Bayesian models that incorporate lots of opinion polling and other data, I’m agnostic. I think they are both helpful.)

But the main thing that struck me about the debate is that there are a lot of people out there who would like to do some amateur election modeling this week. And that’s one of the dirty little secrets of all this: the basic strategy is not wizardry. I’m far, far, far from anything approaching a good modeler and/or quantitative forecaster. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try my hand at it. And the same thing applies to you.

There’s only one file you need to get started. Right-click and save this excel sheet (it’s about 2mb): Electoral College Monte Carlo Simulation Matt Glassman.

Open up the excel file. You will see it contains a list of all states, the number of electoral votes they get, and an associated probability of President Obama winning the state. Each time you alter one of the state win probabilities, the file re-runs a simulation of 50,000 elections, based on the individual state probabilities, and reports the following relevant electoral college results: percentage of time Obama wins, Romney wins, or its a tie; the average number of electoral votes for each candidate; and a graphical probability distribution of Obama’s electoral college votes. Excel will instantly re-run the simulation (it takes about 5 seconds on my crappy computer) any time you change any of the state win probabilities. The graphic you see here is the distribution of outcomes when Nate Sliver’s current (as of 11/1) fivethrityeight win probabilities for each state are plugged into my simulation (not surprisingly, my sim and his sim both find the mean number of BHO EC votes to be about 300; my sim’s estimate of the percent of the time Obama wins is higher — 94% to 79% — most likely because my sim is simple, non-dynamic, and doesn’t account for anything but the state win probabilities). But you can plug in whatever you want. It can be fun to get lost in the various scenarios. Trust me.

Now, let me be crystal clear about one thing: this is not a model of the election. The Monte Carlo simulation is the final step in translating your model into a forecast. Your actual model is the data and analytical process that generates the individual state win probabilities. When you waste a fun hour plugging in various different state probabilities, your implicit model is “my best guess.” In effect, you are just doing somewhat-systematic punditry. If you want to actually model the state probabilities, you need at a minimum some sort of data (if you just want to forecast) or some data and a theory (if you want to forecast and explain the Way Things Work).

Here’s an example of a super-simple forecast model: take the most recent major-firm poll in each state, get Obama’s percentage in the poll, build a table that translates each polling number to a win probability (i.e. polling 52% = 70% win chance; polling 58% = 99.99% win chance), and then just plug in the probabilities that your poll data suggests. Re-run simulation each time you get a new state-level poll.

Of course, that’s an absurdly simple and naive model. All sorts of advancements can be made on it. You can study the historical translation between poll numbers and win probabilities to improve your table; you can average multiple polls; you can weight those averages by the age of the poll and the past track-record of the pollster; you can correct for “house effects” of state-level polls; you can incorporate national polls and weight their contribution to the model; you can incorporate fundamental demographic data about the state; you can use all this to build a baseline and make the whole thing a continuous Bayesian update; you can build in uncertainty.

This sort of complicated and detailed modeling is exactly how the popular models work. Now, Nate Silver’s model is proprietary, but other very good models, such as Drew Linzer’s Votamatic, are fully transparent and available for inspection. Go check it out. It will demystify much of what is going on under the hood of these things. But the bottom line is that simple and complicated models all work the same way: use a formula to translate some data into win probabilities for each state, then simulate the electoral college with those state probabilities.

Also note that the simulation I gave you here isn’t dynamic in any way. It’s the most basic simulation possible. In real life, if Romney wins Pennsylvania — even if he only had a 10% estimated chance of doing so — he would almost certainly win North Carolina and Virgina. The simulator doesn’t account for this; the states are completely independent. Which isn’t how the world works. Making them partially dependent — forcing the simulator to have Romney win NC if he happens to win PA, or having Obama win VA if he happens to win NC — is an important complexity that most serious forecast models employ. This one does not.

And that’s the rub. Simple modeling and forecasting is very easy. Get some data, generate some win probabilities in the states, and then simulate the election. Good modeling and accurate forecasting is much, much tougher. It requires careful theoretical and empirical specification, and a subtle understanding of how politics and public opinion work. Those aren’t chops I have, and they probably aren’t chops you have. But they certainly aren’t magical tools or skills that people are born with. And there is virtually zero barrier to entry to getting started. So why not?

At any rate, enjoy the Monte Carlo simulator — even seat-of-your-pants modeling of the win probabilities is a hell of a lot of fun! And if you want to get more into it, good luck. The sky’s the limit.

The Saratoga Race Course opens this Friday for its 144th season. And this year, my annual pilgrimage with my childhood friends has been arranged for opening weekend. I can’t wait.

Having grown up just south of Saratoga, NY, I spent endless childhood summer days sitting in the majestic track’s picnic area, and just as many teenage summer nights bar-hopping the small-town, mardi-gras-like atmosphere of downtown Saratoga. You get some funny looks in most of the rest of the country when it’s revealed that you know how to calculate the payout on a $2 exacta ((total exacta pool – takeout)/(total winning dollars bet * 2)) or can name the horse that beat Secretariat in the ’73 Whitney (Onion), but it’s neither trashy nor rare to know horse racing where I come from.

I have always loved everything Saratoga. The track. The town. The people. The races. The picnic area. The fancy clothes. The sounds. The smells. The horses. The clubhouse. The paddock. The beautiful afternoons. The walk downtown after the races end. The restaurants. The bars. The horsemen. The horse talk. The kids selling tip sheets. The spinners collecting t-shirts. The fat men smoking cigars and telling anyone in earshot that “they almost had the triple!” All of it.

But I love Saratoga the most in the morning. The races don’t start until 1pm, but you can get into the track as early as you can get out of bed. There’s nothing quite like arriving at the track at 8am, grabbing some picnic tables, playing cards, reading the newspaper, wandering the clubhouse, walking downtown for breakfast, handicapping the races, and shooting the breeze with your buddies as the morning rolls by.

Saratoga is, of course, known as the “graveyard of the favorites.” Secretariat lost to Onion there in the ’73 Whitney. Jim Dandy beat Gallant Fox in the ’30 Travers.  And, of cousre, Man O’ War. When I was a boy, the most famous TV ad for Saratoga was a shot of the sun coming up over the practice track, and a gravely-voiced announcer slowly reciting the famous spine-tingler: Man…O’….War. Greatest…horse…of…all…time. Started twenty-one races…Won twenty of them….His…only…loss? …To a horse…named…Upset…At a  track …. called … Saratoga! There’s really nothing quite like standing at the top of the empty grandstand in the morning and surveying the homestretch while you think about that commercial. Magic.

And so here’s a photo essay of the race course as many people have never seen it. All of these photos were taken a decade ago, in a spat of twenty-something nostalgia, when I realized I would probably never again live near Saratoga, and would likely never visit the mighty racetrack more than once a season. Make sure you click on the pictures to blow them up, much of the beauty is in the details.

Enjoy. And if you’re going to be in Saratoga this weekend, drop me a line. I’ll be in the picnic area telling stories well before noon, and sitting on the roof the City Tavern, staring down at the sights on Caroline street, well past midnight.

The Oklahoma practice track, across the street from the picnic area and the main track, 6am. Although Saratoga is only open for six weeks each year (late July until Labor Day), many horses stable and train in Saratoga for longer stretches.

The spring inside the picnic area. 8am. You’ve never tasted such horrible water, or seen old men down such horrible water like it was the fountain of youth. Not a picnic table in sight at this hour.

One of the trackside restaurants in the clubhouse, with early morning handicappers surveying their racing forms. I swear to you, I have been to Saratoga Race Course hundreds of times, and I have never seen once shred of evidence that you can gain any handicapping edge by studying the Daily Racing Form. None.

The Turf Terrance restaurant in the clubhouse. Jackets required. Fancy hats optional. Political or other connections helpful.

Two horseplayers having breakfast trackside. I prefer Compton’s Diner down on Broadway to the breakfast at the track, but it is fun to watch the workouts while you read the paper and sip coffee. And If you ever want to see someone smoke a cigar at 8am, you’ve come to the right place.

Breakfast at the rail, watching a workout. Those “at the rail” style seats did not exist when I was a boy, but much like Fenway Park, Saratoga has been steadily enhanced over the past 20 years, largely without sacrificing it’s rustic 19th century charm. Like the famous saying goes, it’s not hard to get to Saratoga: you just drive 2 hours north from New York City, turn left off the highway, and go back about 100 years.

Betting windows in the picnic area. The track needs a lot of seasonal labor. Out in the stables, it’s almost entirely Hispanic immigrants. At the lemonade and ice cream stands, it’s almost universally teenagers. And behind the betting windows, it’s disproportionately public school teachers. I can remember going to place a bet once the summer after 9th grade, looking up, and seeing my English teacher. Yikes!

Betting windows in the clubhouse. Like most people at Saratoga, I’m not much of a horseplayer — I usually bet maybe $2-$5 on an given race — but at least I’m not a wimp. You should see my sister. Here standard bet is something like $2 on the favorite to show.

Bartender relaxing outside an empty clubhouse barroom, 10am.

Opening shop in the Carousel Restaurant.

The view from the clubhouse seats. It costs $3 to get into the track, and an additional $2 if you want to get into the clubhouse (neither admission gets you a seat). Throw on a $2 bet on 7 or 8 races, bring your own food and drinks, and it’s more or less the most entertainment you can buy for less than $20.

The picnic area begins to fill up. There are hundreds of actual picnic tables in the picnic area, but they go really fast (it’s first come, first serve), and so many people bring their own card tables, canopies, etc.

Those who prefer the benches start to filter in. Everyone who goes to the track does it differently, and no one can believe anyone else’s logistics make any sense. Some people just wander the whole time (insanity). Some like the benches (ditto). Some like buying seats in the clubhouse (ok). I’ve always been a picnic area guy: set up two bridge tables and a bunch of camping chairs, and use that as a home base from which to occasionally go to the rail, the clubhouse, etc.

The clubhouse entrance starts to get crowded

Programs for sale. These kids make a fortune. The norm at Saratoga is to never take your coin change when you buy something. So those kids are getting 50 cents tip on most programs. And they are selling hundreds of them in the span of about 2 hours. Needless to say, a summer job at the track is a highly prized possession for teenagers, and political connections are often used to obtain one.

The bands begin to play in the picnic area. Sometimes, Saratoga is so classy it hurts. Like the shaving equipment and free cologne in the picnic area men’s room. I’ve seen people stop and use the cologne, but I’ve never observed someone actually lather up for a shave.

Artwork row. I’ve always been tempted to buy an autographed copy of the iconic shot of Turcotte looking back from aboard Secretariat at the 1/16 pole at the ’73 Belmont. But I’ve never pulled the trigger on any racing memorabilia.

Cocktails. Liquor doesn’t sell that all that well at Saratoga Race Course, because (1) you can bring as much of your own as you want into the picnic area, and (2) the atmosphere at the track is a lot more family-friendly than you might otherwise imagine. On the other hand, the legal drinking age in the town of Saratoga during track season seems to be about 17, which makes sense because the legal gambling age at the track seems to be about 12. Family-friendly indeed!

To wit, this more or less standard picture from the picnic area.

The horses enter the paddock for race #1. Watching grown men scream encouragement to a horse as it walks by is both hilarious and scary. You go get ‘em, Mr Peanuts! One time!

Jockeys climb aboard. Watching grown men scream strategy to the jockeys is just plain hilarious. Don’t take him wide this trip, Robbie!

The grandstand and rail fill up. For a typical race, you need to get to the rail about 10 minutes before post if you want to be in the front row along the fence. I usually watch one or two races a day from the rail, one or two from the clubhouse, and the rest on the TV monitors in the picnic area.

Leaving the paddock for the track. One reason a racetrack doesn’t feel like a casino is that the gambling isn’t constant. There’s a solid half hour between races, so you have a lot of down time, which means you aren’t constantly thinking about or engaged in wagering.

Heading toward the starting gates. Obviously, there has been a lot of research done in the last 150 years on horse genetics. The thing that I can’t fathom is that they never figured out how to breed fast thoroughbrdeds that had ankles thicker than toothpicks.

The horses are in the gate. Tom Durkin has been making the calls at the track since I was about 10. I can’t really imagine another voice in the box. I was there on July 28, 2008 for his recent famous call on AARRRRRR!

And they’re off!

Well then. Hello, World!

I’m still, for the foreseeable future, on a blogging hiatus. If and when I do return to more regular posting, it will almost certainly be anonymously (maybe I already am!); the reality is that my blog had become too popular — which is to say “mildly popular” — to be compatible with working for Congress. But that’s life.

Still, I had to surface to jump in on two things:

1. You have to start reading the Mischief of Faction blog. This is the most exciting development in political science blogging since, well, I don’t know. A long freaking time. It’s Seth Masket, Hans Noel, and Greg Koger, bringing the brilliant geekery on all things parties. I cannot recommend this enough.

2. There’s a hot debate on the blogs right now about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It started with a strange Kevin Williamson piece at NRO that seemed to me quite a-historical (and I mean that in the most neutral sense), which was quickly fisked by Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Bernstein, among others. Since then there’s been a lot of writing back and forth on the matter, mostly on the subject of what the party positions were on civil rights and who should get the credit for passing the bill in ’64 and all sorts of derivative stuff from there.

I have a keen interest in all this, because I’ve long been an admirer of the 19th and early 20th century Republican Party and have often wondered what would have happened if things went slightly differently in the mid-20th century. What if Dewey had won in ’44 and tried to push a civil rights bill through the GOP-controlled 80th House? What if Ike had cared more (or at all) about civil rights and done the same thing in the 83rd House? What if Rockefeller had won the ’64 GOP nomination?  And so on and so forth. It’s not a hard alternative history to tell in which the GOP makes the aggressive moves in the 50′s — pushing public accommodations bills, voting rights bills, more fervently supporting Brown v. Board — and forces/compels the northern Democrats to make a clean break from the southerners, or forces them to drift into an even tighter alliance with the segregationists. Who knows what sort of party alignments we’d have now.

Anyway, the debate currently going on has a couple of holes I wanted to fill. So my four points:

1. Simpson’s paradox is in full effect here, and that has some interesting consequences. Simply put, if you control for region, Democrats were more supportive of the CRA in both North and South. Among northern Members of the House support for the CRA was 94% among Democrats and 85% among Republicans. In the South, it was 7% among Democrats and 0% among Republicans. The paradox, of course, is that because there were only 10 Republican House Members from the South, when you compare the two parties in aggregate, the Republicans are much more supportive of the CRA (80% in favor) than the Democrats (61% in favor).

The upshot of this is that you can, more or less, generate any statistic you want, depending on what story you want to spin about the House vote in ’64. Report the party aggregate stat, and the Dems are the bad guys. Report the geographic votes, and you can make the Republicans look comparatively worse. I think the most fair story to draw from just the numbers is this: geography was destiny for the ’64 CRA vote, but party had a small marginal effect. If you knew where a Member was from, you could predict there vote very accurately, regardless of party.

But the rub is — and I think this is where I break from a lot of liberal contributors to the discussion — you could also pretty accurately predict someone’s vote if you knew they were a Republican. As far as the yeas and nays go, that’s the bottom line: the GOP supported the ’64 CRA. I don’t see how you could describe it any other way. That, of course, is not really true of the Democrats. Knowing that a Member was a Democrat doesn’t really give you any information about their vote: 70% of the House voted for the CRA. But just 61% of the Democrats. Knowing someone was a Democrat actually made it more likely that they voted against the bill. But again, geography was destiny.

2. Of course, the real reason the numbers are a sideshow is that intensity of preference was not evenly distributed. This is true all over the map and all over the spectrum. As a group, the most vociferous proponents of civil rights in 1964 were the northern Democrats. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply lying. The northern Republicans were a mixed bag. When it was time to vote, they were nearly as supportive as the northern Democrats, but as a group they ranged from those who were as vociferously in favor of it as the northern Dems, to those who would vote for it but never push for it, to those who rejected the federal bill but believed in civil rights either personally or at the state level. (And, of course, there were a small handful of soft and quiet segregationists in both northern parties).

And that counts in legislative politics. There are all sorts of reasons why the GOP didn’t push civil rights — it wasn’t a big issue for their largely white districts, they had concerns about federal power, they enjoyed watching, and benefited from, the Democrats in-fighting about it, and some of them probably didn’t privately believe in it, or didn’t care — but the fact is that they didn’t. And so they get credit for their votes, but not their attitude. Johnson and the northern Democrats drove the bill. The GOP got on board to help pass it.

But what did not exist in the northern caucus by ’64 — either among Democrats or Republicans — was any sort of hard-core defenders of segregation, or voting discrimination, or — God forgive us — lynching. And this is an important point. Anyone who equates Goldwater’s position with, say, James Eastland’s position on the matter, simply because they voted the same way, is purposefully deceiving you. Or deluding themselves about what it was really like in the South in the early 60′s. I don’t really have any patience for Goldwater-style federalism on civil rights, but the idea that the man belongs in the same category as the southern Democrats is absurd. These were people who were calling their own constituents “niggers” in public campaign speeches and on the floor of the United States Senate. Goldwater had supported the ’57 and ’60 CRAs. And believed in racial equality.

And that’s important too. The southern GOP Members were, for the most part, much less hostile to African-Americans than the southern Democrats. they were, in many ways, the mirror twins of their northern partisans. Remember the old saying about the war, “Not every Democrat was a traitor, but every traitor was a Democrat.” That’s kind of how it went with the violence, the Klan, the voter intimidation, and the public defense of segregation. Not every Democrat in the South thought violence was justifiable against African-American civil rights protesters. But every one who thought it justifiable was a Democrat.

3. And this intensity of preference disparity, in both sections, leads us to the important questions. The key question for the Republican Party, of course, was why didn’t they take up the mantle of civil rights after World War II. After all, they had a long and genuinely admirable history of supporting and pushing for civil rights for African Americans. From passing the 1866 and 1870 CRAs and the 13th-15th amendments, to working toward ensuring voting rights in the South, first at the point of a gun during Reconstruction and then through legislative attempts later on (the 1890 Federal Elections Bill being the most prominent example). Their party platform from 1864 to 1964 routinely contained strong support for African American voting rights and other civil equalities.  And from the war until the New Deal, the vast majority of African Americans voted for them, and most African Americans leaders were Republicans.

People will give you all sorts of answers for why the GOP didn’t get out in front of civil rights in the 20th century. Some think the commitment to African American rights was more political bluster than substantive belief. Some people like to argue the anti-federal nature of the party ideology, although that was only really true after 1928 or so, it can’t explain much before that. And still others will tell you that the Republicans did try on civil rights. And indeed, they often did. And they had many vocal proponents over the 100 year period. And all too often they were stymied by either the Democrats or, more sadly, the conservative wing of their own party.

What amazes me is how contingent the timing, and thus the poltical shake-out, of the ’64 CRA actually was. I don’t think it’s outlandish to suggest that a strong CRA was coming in the 60′s, and that the only question was when. I also don’t think it’s crazy to believe Kennedy might have failed with his bill in ’64; Johnson probably got it through faster than anyone else could have. And so I think it’s entirely possible that any number of men in either party could have led the civil rights charge between ’64 and, say, 1970. Kennedy in a second term. Nixon in ’67 after a ’64 reelection built on the traditional non-South GOP coaltion. Rockefeller. Humphrey. All the ’60 VP contenders, like Scoop Jackson or even Symington. I guess the point is that I sort of think that Johnson was more consequential than important for the CRA; this was idea whose time had come and whose train was leaving the station sooner or later.

And so I think it’s important to remember that the political alignment of the parties is often at the mercy of their role as short-term electoral competitors. That the GOP became less and less supportive of civil rights projects after the CRA, VRA, and Fair Housing is hardly unrelated to the increased Democratic resolve on these issues. I mean, in one sense we all know this: the segregationists started voting against the Dems in the 60′s, and after flirting with Wallace for a while, finally settled in the GOP.  But I think it gets overlooked in a lot of cases, and people underestimate the impact that a slight tipping of the balance can have on the ideologies in a party system. If a GOP President (say, Ike) had led the charge for a real CRA, there’s every chance the southerners would have doubled-down on the Democrats, and tipped the whole equilibrium. And the important thing to remember is that stuff like this cuts across other issues; it seems strange now to think about the party of the lower class being against civil rights. But that was true for many, many decades and could easily be true today.

This sort of party ideology metamorphosis is exactly what happened before the Civil War. The Democrats started losing some traction in the North after the Wilmot proviso. Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act pushed the equilibrium even further: Democrats started losing in the North, meaning the party was more southern, meaning the ideology was more pro-slavery, meaning there would be more losses in the North. Everyone recognizes that as what happened in the 1850′s. No one seems to ever apply it to what happened in the 1960′s. And again, I think it was far more contingent in the 60′s than people want to believe. Kinda like 9/11. If Gore had been president, my sense is that he would have taken similar actions to Bush during 2001 and 2002. And I think it highly likely that the civil liberties wing of the GOP would have become much more prevalent, as the party shaped its basic critique of the war. Instead, by historical dint of Florida balloting, the GOP got Bushism.

But, of course, this brings us to the northern Democrats. I more or less agree with Jon Bernstein here, when he argues that the Democratic party had basically split on civil rights, and that the majority of the elected congressional party strongly supported however liberal of a CRA you could pass by 1964. Just go read Humphrey’s speech at the ’48 convention. These are men who are tired of compromising their values over the issue for the sake of political harmony. But that only raises the key political/moral question: why did so many northern Democrats compromise their values in order to keep peace with the southerners? One answer, of course, is that they didn’t. Humphrey fought like hell for civil rights, and he probably happy to see Thurmond walk out the door in ’48.

But I don’t think that’s good enough. And I think a lot of the problem was institutional. In the broadest sense, one answer is that it’s not clear what they could have done. They weren’t going to join the Republican party en masse; by the time that option would have been acceptable, their northern constituencies would have already demanded a civil rights act from both parties. But the strong arm radical things they could have theoretically done — like trading the Speakership to the Republicans in exchange for GOP support on a strong CRA — seem ridiculous and counterproductive. But they could have held the South’s feet to the fire. They could have passed endless strong CRAs out of the House between ’57 and ’63. They could have pushed endless Powell-amendment-style desegregation bills. Much of the problem, I suspect, was their unwillingness or inability to cross Rayburn. And consequently their inability to corner, or even put much pressure, on the South in the House.

This is a bit unfair; they weakened Judge Smith’s control over the Rules committee in ’61 and ’63, which was certainly a victory for civil rights. But in general the position of the northern democrats was something closer to “don’t rock the boat” than it was to “go to hell, segregationists.” Perhaps Kennedy is the perfect embodiment of this position. None of this is to say that the northern democrats don’t deserve their assigned credit for the CRA; they do. It’s just more evidence, I think, that they ideology of the northern democrats was slippery enough, and their hold on the party precarious enough, that a retrenchment of Democratic views on civil rights, via northerners leaving the party and southern influence expanding, was not out of the question in the 60s, particularly if a GOP President had launched out in favor of a strong CRA.

Whenever I tell my liberal friends that I’m considering voting for a Republican candidate, they look at me like I have three heads. How could you possibly vote for that party? This always bemuses me because most of my liberal friends are the exact kind of intellectual ideologues who would have (a) been northern Democrats in 1960, and (b) would have been bending over backwards to make arguments to me about why they had to work with the southerners even though they hated their position on the great moral issue of the day. Politics is an art of compromise. Until the issue becomes one that you can no longer compromise on. And I think an honest critique of the northern Democrats is that they kept on compromising their principles far too long on civil rights.

4. Who cares? Which, I think, should in turn make us less sure about this whole debate. In the big picture, I don’t really care which party was for civil rights. I just care which Members were for it, both then and now. Just as it doesn’t really matter now which party brought down slavery (and I don’t think there’s a bizzaro-Williamson out there arguing that it was the Democrats), it doesn’t really matter which party passed the CRA.

I’m going to admire Hubert Humphrey and Thomas Dewey on the issue just as much as I’m going to shame Goldwater and despise Eastland. And the party labels next to their names don’t seem, to me, to have much bearing on anything besides the history books. Anyone trying to connect the CRA vote in ’64 to comtemporary politics is, at best, stretching things. Especially when they try to turn the CRA into some sort of black and white partisan debate. There were heroes and there were villains in the civil rights battle. But they were not uniformly wearing opposite party labels.

Ok, I’ve babbled enough. Till next time…

“Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.”

-H.L. Mencken

The quadrennial two-week General Conference of the Methodist Church is currently running. Well, then. We’ve got lots to talk about.

I don’t think there’s a more quintessentially American institution of civil society than the Methodist Church. An 18th century offshoot of Anglican Protestantism, American Methodism is infused with the cultural, institutional, and political character of the United States. And nowhere is this more clear than in the governance structure of the church. First and foremost, the congregants are sovereign. Everything — and I mean everything — can ultimately be put to a popular vote. Second, there’s a Constitution, which not only requires a supermajority of the legislature (oh yes, more on this in a sec) to change, but also must be ratified by the provincial bodies. At the national level, there are three branches — a legislature (the General Conference) that can write/amend a body of laws, an Executive (the Council of Bishops; there’s no singular pope-like figure), and a Judiciary (the Judicial Council). And while the Council of Bishops is obviously restricted to clergy members, it is ultimately popular elections (either direct or indirect) that populate all of the positions.

More fascinating is the federalism of the system, which looks something like a cross between American federalism and the structure of the 19th century American political parties. Churches are grouped into conferences, with each conference headed by an elected bishop. The conferences serve as provincial governments.  Each conference has an annual meeting (confusingly called the annual conference), which is attended by all pastors and an equal number of delegates elected by the individual churches and which serves as the legislative session for the year — ordaining clergy, setting budgets, goals, and policies. And, of course, every four years, the annual conference selects delegates to the national general conference. The general conference — the meeting of the national legislature — is the only entity that can make general policy (theological, governance, or otherwise) for the church.

Of course, all of this sits upon a radically decentralized reality. Whatever the governance structure, the true character of the system is self-reliance. Individual churches set their own budgets, raise their own money, own their own physical churches, and pay their own pastor’s salary. From the point of view of the typical congregant, both the annual conference and the general conference are vague, distant, and unimportant bodies. The church has a national Constitution? Even the name of the conference bishop is something that escapes most of the congregation. It’s reminiscent of the relationship between college fraternity chapters and their national organizations; you know you are part of something, you know they make the rules, you know that you send a bunch of money off to them each year, but you aren’t really sure what you get for it or why you do it.

And so if you compare the Methodist Church on this dimension to, say, the Catholic Church, well, it’s not really comparable. It’s a decentralized democracy vs. a hierarchical oligarchy. And, by God, you can feel it when you are there! I grew up in the Methodist Church —  my grandfather was the pastor when I was a boy, and my uncle was the pastor when I was older — but I now attend a suburban Catholic Church  because my wife is Catholic and our kids are too (don’t get me started).

At a Catholic Church, when you walk around the building, you definitely feel like you are part of something. Something big. But it doesn’t feel like it’s your big thing. You don’t feel like you collectively own the place, like you can drop into the youth lounge and put your feet up. Or borrow some folding chairs for a party at your house. Or bring your kids over on a Tuesday afternoon to play in the nursery school. And if you don’t like something that is going on at the Catholic Church, you either keep your mouth shut and complain later at the dinner table, or you ask the priest if there’s anything he can do. If you don’t like something that is going on at the Methodist Church, you start quietly gathering political support so you can call a meeting and change it. At any rate, you don’t start the complaining until after you’ve lost the vote.

Which brings us to General Conference.  If you grew up in a Methodist Church like I did, your first reaction to the thought of 1000 Methodists in political convention is probably to laugh. And your second is to shudder. And if you aren’t familiar with the Methodist Church and the people who populate it, you ain’t never seen nothing like this. I highly recommend checking out the website for the conference, or leafing through the 1100 pieces of proposed legislation, using the legislation tracker (yes, that’s right). Or see what the committees are marking up today — starting at 7am — on the schedule. And like every good political convention, it all starts with a potential floor fight over the rules. Which begins in a Committee on Credentials. Subject to the rulings of a Parliamentarian.  But just follow the live blog.  Or watch the live stream. Or follow on Twitter at #GC2012. Awesome.

Mencken was more right than he knew.

On major issues of heated debate within the church (such as theological stance on homosexuality, which pits the liberal northeast and west against the conservatives in the South and Midwest), there’s barely even a pretense to anything but bare-knuckle politics at General Conference. My mom’s more or less what is known as a “church boss” in the Methodist Church — she’s somehow always in a power role at the local church, or wielding influence over something — but even she’s too timid to try to be a delegate to General conference. She was a delegate at annual conference last year, and when I asked her why she didn’t stand for election to General conference, she said, “I can’t politic like that. What connections do I have?” Ahem. You lived in a parsonage your entire childhood, you know every freakin’ minister in the district, and you are a church boss. That’s not good enough? Evidently not.

Anyway, the real reason I needed to set you up with all that background is that one of the hottest issues at General Conference is what is known as “Guaranteed Appointment.” Put in place in the mid-20th century in part to protect newly-allowed female pastors, the system requires Bishops to appoint all ministers in good standing to a church. In effect, tenure. The problem is that there are about 900 too many ministers in the Methodist Church right now; as with many mainline Protestant denominations, Methodist congregations are shrinking in size and many churches that can no longer support a pastor on their own are consolidating.

So the finances of it alone has produced a strong political movement to stop the guarantees. But there are other reasons, too. The Commission to Study the Ministry believes that Guaranteed Appointments are “a major contributor to mediocrity and ineffectiveness” that “restricts the flexibility of bishops to appoint the most effective person for each congregation.” As my grandma — the wife of a Methodist minister — always said, “Guaranteed Appointment just protects the lazy, the crazy, and the incompetent.” And so the movement is afoot to weaken the tenure system, and to make it easier to remove allegedly mediocre, but still-in-good-standing, ministers.

I have very serious reservations about this, mostly for institutional reasons. But let’s start with the non-institutional problems. Just like academic tenure, there are potential speech chilling effects in the pulpit. Would you be as willing to take any sort of political stand as a minister — be it against segregation or against anti-gay discrimination — if you knew the bishop could easily remove you if the water got too hot? I’m sure more than one minister would have thought twice in such situations. But that raises an even wider issue; is it even possible to abolish a tenure system and not have politics start to creep into removal decisions? Another concern is competition. Do we really want ministers set against each other for a limited number of jobs?

Still, those concerns pale in comparison to the institutional issues. The main problem I see is the spillover power of the bishops. If they are suddenly empowered to not retain ministers in their conference, their political clout skyrockets. In a conference overpopulated with ministers, who will want to challenge the bishop about anything. I just don’t see any way around this; ending guaranteed appointments will centralize power in the bishops. My hunch is that’s bad, but of course, just like any institutional change, it’s not inherently bad; I may be overlooking very good reasons to centralize power.

I also worry about the federal nature of the implementation. If the bishops can deny appointments within their conference, that might well solve some of the alleged problems within a conference. But some of the demographic problems are inter-conference issues; some conferences are overpopulated with clergy in the aggregate, while others have a shortage. Ending guaranteed appointments by empowering bishops can’t speak to that, since they can’t unilaterally make inter-conference appointments of ministers.

My family is in town for my daughters’ birthday parties this weekend, and we hashed this out over dinner last night. On the one hand it was unremarkable: a family with many Methodist ministers in it (although none present) came to the unanimous conclusion that the guaranteed appointment system for ministers should continue, and that we should sign the petition going around right now to oppose the legislation at General Conference. Big surprise, right?

But on the other hand, our dinner conversation was utterly exemplary of the incredibly role that the protestant churches play in fostering American democratic civil society. Whatever you make of the political influence the churches have on American politics — and I have grave reservations about the contemporary relationship of the two — I don’t think it is debatable that the very existence of the churches as democratic organizations themselves is a boon for the American republic. We were self-governing last night, in the broadest sense.

I don’t want to get all Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on you, but I think it’s important to note that, in my experience, you don’t get that dinner conversation about the Catholic church. Sure, you can (and we do) have endless discussions about women priests or allowing priests to marry, but there’s no self-empowerment to it. It’s mostly just bitching about (or defending) Rome.You can almost sense your serfdom as you do it.

And I think that has consequences for how people understanding their place and role within their church, as well as the role that the church can play in complimenting and reinforcing the basic democratic structure of American society. And so while Mencken was quite right in one sense — just show up in a Methodist church basement sometime for a controversial budget meeting, it will definitely be enough to make you question God’s existence — in some ways I think he missed the point. Democracy is a wonderful, but ugly, system. That the ugliness is reflected in a republic’s strongest civil institutions should not be seen as a defect of those institutions, but as a reassuring feature.

Most of this post is housekeeping, but let me make a minor Senate/filibuster point first:

As I’ve written many times, those who want to reform the filibuster tend to overlook the two key problems of a filibuster-less contemporary Senate. First, it would still be malapportioned. Second, it would almost certainly function like the House, in which minority amendments that could command floor majorities would be shut out by agenda setting rules of the majority party. And so it has never been clear to me that the status quo Senate could be improved by turning it into a small, malapportioned House with long terms. (As usual, I caveat this by saying I’m in favor of filibuster reform for nominations; but I think that’s clearly a different issue).

But that’s just the instant analysis. One bigger institutional point is that there are some tree branches you can’t back out of once you’ve gone down them. It’s virtually unthinkable that the Senate will not retain its malapportioned character over the coming generations. You have to accept that as fact. And therefore you also have to accept that comparisons to popularly apportioned parliamentary systems are inherently weak. It doesn’t really matter if majoritarian popular legislatures work in England or Germany or the South side of the Capitol building, because you can’t get there from here.

That’s a message for both institutional designers and institutional reformers, although it speaks slightly differently to each. To the former, it’s a question of care; decisions about institutional design — be it a government or a fantasy football league, become sticky very quickly, and can foreclose future change. To the reforms, it speaks to working in the word of the possible.  I completely agree with anyone who says that we would never create the current American legislative branch if we were starting today. But that’s the point. We aren’t in the position of institutional design on a blank slate; we’re in a situation of potential institutional reform.

Anyway, on to the housekeeping:

Apologies for the lack of posts this week. Unfortunately, circumstances are conspiring such that 2 posts or so a week may be more the norm than my previous pace.

For one, I’m running out of low-hanging fruit; after a couple hundred posts, I don’t really have many obvious and moderately-fresh bullets left chambered and ready in the institutional politics shotgun. So keeping up a daily pace would almost certainly result in reduced quality.

Of course, one way to prevent reduced quality is to be more responsive to current events. The problem for me there is that I work in legislative branch, and blogging more about day-to-day politics quickly crosses into questionable territory, if not outright conflict of interest with my job. Or worse, devolves into partisan writing, which is the last place I want (or am allowed) to venture.

As this blog has gotten modestly more popular, it has become tougher and tougher to stay 100% on the appropriate side of those lines. As much as I try to keep my writing institutional, I feel it sliding these directions; hopefully, a lighter pace will solve that problem.

The last two pieces of the puzzle are somewhat happier. The novel I’ve been working on for the better part of 5 years is once again occupying a fair amount of my time, and may actually end up somewhere besides the desk drawer of my study. I’ve also returned to semi-serious running and road racing. I don’t see any sub-18 minute 5k’s in my near future, but I’m putting in more miles/week than I have in years.

Of course, I don’t want to give any regular readers the idea that I’m hanging it up; quite to the contrary. But my plan for the next few months, at least, is something like a Tuesday/Thursday publication schedule.

Besides, I don’t know a damn thing about elections, and that’s what you are going to want to be reading for the next six months.

See you Tuesday.

MG

Here’s Ed Kilgore, today, on the filibuster:

I’m among those who really get upset when people sort of internalize the recent routine use of the filibuster by Republicans to create a de facto 60-vote requirement for doing business in the Senate, as though it came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. It didn’t. It’s a revolutionary development in the empowerment of congressional minorities, of special utility to those who wish to obstruct progress. And it has a huge ripple effect on what happens in the House (as Frank indicates), the White House, and the country. We should never get used to it until it’s modified or gone.

Kevin Drum agrees, with an insightful response:

Agreed. And yet, in a way, it seems to me that Ed is wrong: we have to internalize the recent routine use of the filibuster first in order to have any chance of getting rid of it. As long as the public continues to hear about “filibusters,” they’ll continue to think that this is just Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, something that happens now and again when the minority party opposes a bill especially strongly. It’s only when everyone starts to realize that the Senate is a 60-vote body — not a place where filibusters take place periodically, but a 60-vote body — that we might finally get some public pushback on this.

Or maybe not. The sad truth is that no matter what we call it, filibusters will probably retain strong support pretty much forever. In general, fear of what your opponents could do in a majoritarian Congress seems to be a much stronger motivation than passion for what your own party could do.

Regular readers will know that I have concerns with all this. I’ve explained my views on majoritarianism and the filibuster many times (see here for my basic overview thoughts on the filibuster; here on the primary cost of getting rid of it; and here for my thoughts on democracy and majoritarianism), so I don’t want to completely rehash the whole argument. But it’s worth restating my three basic points:

1. The Senate is malapportioned. Removing the filibuster will not ameliorate this, and may exacerbate it.
2. A majoritarian Senate will operate, functionally, like a second House of Representatives. This has real, knowable costs, such as the foreclosing of minority amendments that could carry a floor majority, and the disappearnce of the compromise that such amendments now foster.
3. Following from 1 and 2, there’s no ex ante reason to think trading in the status quo Senate for a small, malapportioned House with six year terms would improve American democracy.

Now, I’m not saying that eliminating the filibuster wouldn’t alter the policy outputs of Washington, or restructure Hill politics, or even have an effect on congressional elections. I actually think it would do all three of those things. I just don’t think the aggregate effect of those changes is obviously good for the republic. (I would like to see the filibuster pared back on nomination, which is a largely a separate issue). As Kevin notes, there’s no real reason to think that any particular partisan ideology would have an advantage. Both sides have priorities that have been held up or watered down by the filibuster; so for every public option or bigger stimulus that the liberals could obtain, there would be a stronger partial birth abortion ban and deeper tax cuts for the conservatives.

What I think you would get — and what I don’t think filibuster critics grapple with seriously enough — is an absolute increase in the volume of legislation. Not better legislation. Not worse legislation. Just more legislation. And that’s raises the question: is more legislation — unconnected to ideology or party or quality — inherently a good thing? I’m skeptical. Not because I’m a libertarian, although I suppose that’s a sizable part of it. But because I think making legislation easier to pass interacts in bad ways with a systemic problem of a democracy: management bias.

There’s a basic incentive built into democratic political systems that encourages politicians to Do Things To Help People. That’s mostly good news! It sure as heck beats any real-world alternative system. But it does result in political actors wanting to signal to their constituents that they are using their public offices to solve problems. And so it encourages the finding and passing and implementing of “solutions” in the form of legislation and government action, even when there’s a problem that can’t be solved, or the “solution” doesn’t solve the problem, or the “problem” doesn’t even exist. Trust me, you can think of plenty of examples.

Just like baseball managers have incentives to over-manage (changing pitchers, pinch-hitting, etc.) because public opinion is less harsh toward actively managing and failing than it is toward sitting on your hands and failing, so do politicians have the same incentives. Even when sitting on your hands is the optimal policy. Managers gonna manage. It’s a corollary to the idea of the cost of good intentions. How often do you hear from people Well, we have to do something. We can’t just let X happen! In many cases, this is undoubtedly true. But in a fair number of cases, it’s precisely wrong. Sometimes you want to sit on your hands. And given that representative democracies are prone to over-management bias, institutional reforms that allow for easier production of legislation are bound to exacerbate the bias toward over-management.

There are those who will object to this, those who believe that if we had triple the amount of legislative output from Congress and it was, in aggregate, neutral from a partisan perspective, that it would be a net benefit for the nation. That active government, regardless of ideology, is better than restrained government. That good intentions and our best efforts at improving conditions are worthwhile and have merit, even if they do not, in fact, improve conditions. That the state’s role is to govern, and that to govern is to actively manage. I will not convince anyone who believes so otherwise. But I do, however, respectfully disagree.

Jamelle Bouie:

For years, liberals have argued that polarization his little to do with the Democratic Party—which they see as largely centrist—and everything to do with a Republican Party, which has moved far to the right since the 1970s. Recent research from political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have measured polarization and ideological shifts in Congress, confirms that theory. According to NPR, they’ve found that the GOP is more conservative now than it’s been in a century … [m]oreover, Republicans have moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left, and that goes a long way toward explaining the gridlock of the last three years, during which time Republicans have refused to play ball on everything from economic recovery—they opposed the stimulus plan, even after signing on to George W. Bush’s plan for boosting the economy in 2008—to financial regulation and a health-care-reform bill built on conservative ideas.

I love Jamelle’s blog and I highly recommend you start reading it if you don’t already. But this line of reasoning — which is quite common among the chattering class liberals I know — is one that I find more or less wrong. Now, it’s perfectly correct on the facts; the work of Poole et. al. is not without critics, but it’s widely accepted (and certainly I accept it) that they have an excellent, unbiased statistical measure of these sorts of things, and that we can trust their results. Let there be no doubt that:

1. The congressional GOP has gotten significantly more conservative since 1976.

2. The congressional Democrats have gotten slightly more liberal during the same time period.

3. The ideological gap between the parties is at a local maxima.

What I don’t think follows, however, is the often-presented idea that Democratic positions are now centrist while the Republicans positions are radical outliers. For Jamelle — and for many liberals — the story is quite simple: the Republican Party went off the deep end ideologically. But I don’t think it’s quite that easy. For a lot of reasons. But I only want to discuss one in particular.

Public preferences over policy are not fixed; over time, they change. Often very much so. The key unstated lynchpin of the liberal argument here is that either (a) there’s an absolute ideological scale upon which we can pin individual party ideologies such that we can declare any given party as either centrist or radical at any given time; or (b) there’s not an absolute ideological scale, but current aggregate citizen preferences are very similar, ideologically, to what they were in the 1970′s. Both of those strike me as absurd on their face. There’s no absolute ideological scale. Thinking the income tax rate on millionaires should be 35% just can’t be fixed on the ideological spectrum. It could be liberal or conservative, depending on what year you live in. Even more so, if there were some sort of absolute ideological scale, when were the positions fixed? Anytime before 1900, and both contemporary parties register as radically liberal. If the latter — that positions haven’t changed recently — is true, then how the hell are these radical Republicans winning so many damn elections?

Alternative hypothesis: a large portion of the citizens of the United States got economically more conservative in the last generation. Now, don’t go pulling out all your survey data showing that people really want Medicare or other government services or whatever. That doesn’t matter. What matters is votes, and U.S. citizens have consistently moved economically rightward over the last forty years on the dimension of which candidates they have picked to hold elective federal office. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that. There’s no rule that the median voter or the centrist position had to forever remain fixed circa 1965, in favor of Great Society liberalism. In fact, Democrats should thank god that’s the case, since it took a tremendous resetting of the centrist positions in America in order for the liberal achievements of the 20th century to take place. Times change. People have different views on government. And despite the way some liberals look at it, those views don’t necessarily have to liberalize over time.

Under this alternative hypothesis, some of the more troubling aspects of modern politics are explainable in ways that put us at ease, rather than sound the systemic alarm bells. Instead of having to torture ourselves trying to figure out by what conspiracy (campaign finance, voter suppression, media bias, gerrymandering) the Republicans keep winning majorities in Congress and taking the Presidency, we can just accept that their policies are highly competitive for the median voter’s vote. Even better, we can stop tying ourselves in knots over whether “democracy still works” or any of that pap. Of course it does. You can say a lot of things about the United States Congress, but what you cannot say is that the Members are not attuned and responsive to the preferences of their constituents. There’s a market for citizen votes, and the allegedly radical brand that the Republicans are selling is doing quite well with the allegedly centrist brand that the Democrats are selling.

That should tell you something.

And that’s sort of the point here. It’s time to get over the long series of ideas that declares the post-1980 GOP the result of anything besides a competitive party program. Yes, Reagan was personally popular. Yes, racism and welfare queens were part of the game. Yes, the economy was terrible in 1980. Yes, redistricting and scandal and rot hurt the Dems in 1994. Yes, George W. Bush was likable on the “have a beer with him” dimension. Yes, the Iraq war was trumped up bullshit. Yes, the Bush administration waved the bloody shirt of 9/11 around like champs. Yes, gay marriage constitutional amendments were on the ballot. Yes, the average person doesn’t understand the ACA. Yes, there’s a racist element to the Tea Party. Yes, the media buried Mike Dukakis and John Kerry. Yes, there’s a partisan media now.

But it still doesn’t add up. Here’s an alternative hypothesis: the political market is working just fine, and the median voter likes what the GOP is selling on economics. Or, to put it as as plainly as it can be put: just forget about the old center. It’s gone. Stop wasting time figuring out what’s broken, and instead start selling your policies. It will probably never be bipartisan 1964 again in your lifetime, with the center of two parties beating up on a bunch of old explicit racists on the wings. And, besides, that was the anomaly. Just accept that we are back to 1880 in American politics — with two very divergent parties pushing two very divergent agendas in response to two sets of constituents that see things very differently, not because either one is evil, but because they have very different interests, and different beliefs about how to achieve the interests that are the same. And that’s there’s nothing wrong with that and nothing broken about the system whatesoever. This is politics in a democracy. The last 50-60 years? That was a rare divergence.

And so I don’t really enjoy arguments like the one Jamelle was making this morning, that the systemic dysfunction of Washington politics is due to an off-the-rails party that won’t compromise with another party, one that occupies the center and is perfectly in line with the median voter. It defies the market logic of elections. And I don’t think it’s particularly productive. As if gridlock in American politics is a new form. Sure, it’s particularly strong right now, but there’s a market correction for that: sweep an election. What’s that, you can’t win a sweep? Why the hell not, if you are a centrist party facing a radical outlier party? Even the Democrats couldn’t screw that up. (I half-kid). And so I’m not at all convinced that “pox on both your houses” is unfair. Is it silly? Yes. Ending gridlock through bipartisan comprise is the kind of thing that actually pleases very few. Gridlock is better solved by elections and clear winners. But while I sympathize with the idea that the supposedly-neutral media is often at fault when one party is clearly causing a policy problem by both are getting blamed (a good example is budget nonsense of the GOP as of late), I don’t think it translates well to the systemic argument against the GOP.

It can only hold the Democrats back to think otherwise, and to fixate on this idea that politics should exist as it were in 1965 or 1984 or whatever. I had an old lefty professor in graduate school who, after the 2004 election, more of less threw his hands up in the air and said, “I used to understand American politics. It used to make sense. Now? I just don’t get it.” He suffered from the problem described herein, the unwillingness to accept that the Democrats aren’t going to have the House forever, that the 1995 election wasn’t a lightning-in-a-bottle outlier, that things weren’t going back to “normal” anytime soon. Because they have been the beneficiaries of this change, Republicans have been quicker to understand all of this. It would serve Democrats well to figure it out, and then accept it, sooner rather than later.

Of course, if you take this view — and I’m presenting the extreme case for it, I suppose — then a question still looms. If the country has gotten so much more economically conservative, then why haven’t the Democrats followed suit? If you look at the Poole et. al. graph again, you can see that between World War II and 1975, both parties appear to have gotten more liberal, during a period that we might say that was reflective of the polity. So what is going on now? Why hasn’t the Democratic line swung back more conservative? Part of it, I think is artifactual; things lke party-switchers and redistricting and the disappearance of the southern conservative democrats all tend to create and/or mask aggregate idelogical change where it may or may not have existed previously. If you take a conservative southern Democrat, have him switch parties without switching ideologies, then the two party lines diverge further despite no change in underlying preferences. So that might be — and in fact probably is — masking some actual Democratic drift toward the right. if the Democrats weren’t moving rightward in the last few decades, they would have gotten killed at the polls.

But it might also be the strategies of the parties themselves. Not only can a citizenry move to the right or left, but you can influence one to do so! This is the other side of the liberal blindspot. How many times did I hear at the Midwest Political Science Association convention this past week the idea that “the GOP is going off a cliff, and they are going to get absolutely destroyed in the next few elections.” Maybe! But parties are not just reflective participants in the voting market; they are also information providers. The Republicans of 1854 were launched by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but they didn’t sit around for six years waiting for the population to grown ever more angry at the potential expansion of slavery westward. They went out there and sold a cause that didn’t originally have majority support in every northern state. You can influence the voters. And so perhaps the GOP is moving huge chunks of voters rightward, while the Democrats are collectively (but not intentionally or explicitly) sitting around, caught between whether they should be moving voters leftward or chasing the Republicans rightward. It’s possible.

And it would also further explain the alternative thesis. Things have changed. Voter opinion has changed. It’s time to stop pretending, writ large, they have not. The anomaly is not going away. Your “normal” was the anomaly.

I will be in Chicago for the rest of the week, attending the Midwest Political Science Association conference. Therefore, blogging might be lighter in the next few days. Or heavier. We’ll see.

I would also like to take this opportunity to once again call bullshit on both the MPSA and the Chicago Cubs. If you guys could coordinate your schedules a little better in the future, I would really appreciate it. Ok?

Yesterday, over at The Monkey Cage, Andrew Gellman reprinted an email from a Daily Beast journalist who was asking what one thing social scientists wished most that the average voter understood. Here’s part of the email:

So I’m curious: What is the one insight from political science, psychology, or behavioral economics that you most wish the hypothetical “median American voter” knew, that would most contribute to his or her ability to swim safely through the torrent of nonsense about to be unleashed?

I didn’t email the journalist, but I knew my answer in less than 5 seconds. If there were one thing I wished the average person understood, it would be the concept of the marginal effect of an individual independent variable, and the broader idea of multiple independent variables in causal models. Hell, if I could magically get the DC press corp to understand it, I think my life would be complete. But I feel like a lot of people do not understand it, and a fair number of people who do understand it deliberately ignore it for the purpose of partisan argument.

Here’s the example I currently use when I’m trying to explain all this to my crazy uncles at the dinner table. There are two pretty common opinions about government intervention in the economy that you hear floating around these days:

1) People who says “the Obama stimulus failed because unemployment didn’t go down.”

2) Bruce Bartlett, writing a while back:

It’s axiomatic among Republicans that taxes on the rich are the single most important factor determining economic growth. If that were true, then the period from 1988 to 1990, when the top rate was just 28 percent, should have been the most prosperous in recent American history. During that time we had the lowest top rate since 1931. But although 1988 started out okay with a real GDP growth rate of 4.1 percent, it fell to 3.6 percent in 1989 and just 1.9 percent in 1990.

To both of these, I say, in a word: no.

NO!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

There are probably no two individual variables in the economic world that operate in a purely bivariate relationship. Trust me, life would be a lot easier if there were. Instead, you have to think about things as having marginal effects and being embedded in a multivariate model. That is, what is the independent effect of the stimulus, or of a change in the tax rate for the rich. And that requires either a strong counter-factual, or some good statistical estimation work, based on the principles of causal inference and multivariate control. Neither of these are easy.

But first, reason it out. Why is it silly to say the stimulus failed because unemployment went up? Well, just ask any Democrat: the stimulus actually worked like a charm because if we didn’t have it, unemployment would be 20%!

Well, maybe.

We don’t have any proof of that sitting in this blog post. But it illustrates the concept: the marginal effect of the stimulus on unemployment — that is, the real-world state of current unemployment vs. the real-world state of current unemployment had their been no stimulus — is the only thing that matters. If unemployment would have been the same without the stimulus, it failed. Badly. But if it would have been 20% without the stimulus, it was a miraculous success. Even though unemployment went up during the stimulus.

Same with the tax rate and GDP. If GDP would have been negative between 1988 and 1990, then the lower tax rate for the rich was a massive success. If it would have not been any different, then it was not a success. Again, marginal effect, with all other variables accounted and controlled for.

But there’s the rub: the counter-factuals are tough to estimate. Really tough.

So while it’s completely ridiculous to say the stimulus failed simply because unemployment went up, it’s just as crazy to assert that unemployment would have been X% higher without it, unless you have some data. Same with the tax rate/GDP issue.

Bad news: the data is hard to interpret, and subject to a lot of massaging. It’s as much art as science. So yes, we have theoretical reasons to believe that a stimulus has a marginal positive effect on unemployment. But how much that translates into hard numbers is an open question. Same with taxes and GDP. We just don’t know. And that makes it really hard to evaluate the value of public policies. Is a $800 billion stimulus worth it? Maybe, but it depends a lot on what the marginal effect of it is on unemployment. Good luck.

There are billions of applications of this, of course, because so many bivariate relationships are tormented by lurking variables. And it solves a lot of curious puzzles. Everyone knows that African Americans are less likely to vote than white Americans. But isn’t it odd that a multi-decade fight for the right to vote and the emphasis on its importance in the black community didn’t result in African-Americans voting at a higher rate than whites?

Well, surprise, it did! But the disproportionate number of African Americans who are poor and uneducated masks the result in a bivariate analysis, since income and education level are strongly important variable in predicting voter turnout at the individual level. Once you control for income and education, however, African Americans vote at a significantly higher rate than whites. Rich, educated African Americans vote at a higher rate than rich, educated whites, and poor uneducated African Americans vote at a higher rate than poor uneducated whites. Just as we might suspect given the history of the 20th century civil rights movement.

And that’s the point here: marginal effects are the only thing that are truly important. Bivariate causal relationships should always be suspect on first glance. And probably on last glance too.

Will Wilkenson:

Politics makes us stupid. This is one of my recurring themes. This is the principal reason I refuse to be a partisan or ideological team player. People call me libertarian but I don’t in part because I’m not one, but mostly because I suspect that accepting any such label dings my IQ about 15 points.

And Will again, following up:

Let me tell a little story. Up until the weeks before I parted ways with Cato, I never felt any overt pressure to toe any sort of party line. But almost as soon as I left, I found that I was noticeably less reflexively defensive about anti-libertarian arguments. I found it easier to the see merit it in them! I feel sure that much of this has to do with the fact that at some level I had recognized that my livelihood depended on staying within the broad bounds of the libertarian reservation, and that this recognition had been exerting a subtle unconscious pressure on my thought.

Once I became an independent operator, much of that pressure lifted. And as soon as that pressure lifted, I began to feel much less attached to the libertarian label. And as that sense of attachment waned, I became even less reflexively defensive about anti-libertarian arguments. It became hard for me to avoid the conclusion that my political self-conception had been interfering with my ability to evaluate arguments objectively. I had been letting people on my team get away with bad arguments, and I had been failing to acknowledge the force of arguments against my team’s tenets. The fact that everybody else does this, too, doesn’t make me feel any better about my own sins against Truth.

These thoughts fit into a larger discussion that includes Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, and the Andrew Sullivan crew. I largely agree with Wilkenson as far as my own experience with political intelligence. When I stopped trying to have an ideology, and stopped trying to understand the world and human behavior as fitting into some unified system that could then produce easy normative prescriptions and teleological goals, things became much clearer. Yeah, I still call myself a whig and a libertarian, but I do that just as shorthand for people, and I end up qualifying it so much that it might not even be worth it.

But that brings me to my main point. This discussion seems geared almost exclusively to the chattering class. It’s easy enough (and i think correct!) to say that political identities end up having the corrosive effects that Will suggest when they are taken up by people who spend a lot of time thinking about politics and policy and government and how Mitt Ronmey is going to attract moderate women between now and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. But that’s a very small number of people. The vast majority of people living in a democracy aren’t political junkies, or even very much interested in day-to-day politics. And they definitely aren’t ideologues.

And that’s fine! People are busy with their lives, and if you don’t work in or around politics or live in DC, you can’t really spend your day thinking about these things. And you probably have better things to do with your free time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Most Americans start paying attention to national politics when the elections get close, and maybe they go vote in a primary but probably not, and when it’s time to elect new Representatives and Senators and a President they will study the information made available to them and make a reasonably informed choice. It’s sometimes amazing that democracy works, but it does, in fact, work.

But there’s the rub: while the political labels may dumb down your average DC chattering class political writer who used to work at a think tank, the labels and identities are essential shortcuts for the average citizen participating in electoral politics. You can bemoan the partisan hearts and minds of the electorate, but no one has yet devised a better system of signals that allow low-information voters to make election choices that reflect their political beliefs and interest priorities. It’s amazing but true: even the flimsiest notion that your interests and political priorities are better served by one party than by the other can guide you to informed choice up and down the ballot on election day.

And so my guess is that political identities and labels have an attenuating effect in society. Yes, they might dumb-down the chattering class by giving people tribal identities that become constitutive components of their political being and thus lead them to irrational defenses of their own “team,” but at the same time they take the vast majority of voters — those with less information about candidates, policies, and government — and provide them with the key to meaningful participation in a republic. To strip away the political identities that such citizens use as voting cues would not free them from their mental chains, but instead unmoor them from their participatory political lifeline. And such theories tend, in my view, to collapse into the kind of hopeless elitism that is either pessimistic about the quality of the voters, or about democracy in general.

Now, you can bemoan this state of affairs, and we can all normatively desire that everyone spent their recreational time studying policy and politics and informing themselves on an issue-by-issue basis. But that’s dreamworld. And it’s why I find almost all general attacks on the party system more or less not credible. Whatever pain the party system brings to elites — including the problems Wilkenson identifies — and whatever distortions it causes by preying on the general public ignorance about the details of politics, policy, and procedure, it provides the fundamental linkage between the population, their basic political interests, and the government. And it does this by providing those citizens with, yes, a political identity in the form of a political label.

Andrew Gellman argues that political scientists are too skeptical about institutional reforms:

I resist what I see as the occasional habit of political scientists to report a null effect and imply from that the conclusion that various reforms don’t matter or shouldn’t be done. This comes up here with term limits for judges and has also come up regarding ideas for campaign finance reform, nonpartisan primaries, and nonpartisan redistricting. I resist anti-reform arguments for two reasons:

1. There’s no reason to believe that whatever happens to be the current rule in the U.S. is actually an optimal policy or anything close to it. Reforms proposed for the U.S. are often close to existing policies in other countries.

2. Outcomes are multidimensional. I discuss various potential outcomes of term limits on judges here and here.

3. Much of the research essentially compares of the current system to the past. There were long-serving elderly judges in the past, just as there are today, so why worry?

Jon Bernstein counters, arguing that the phenomena might just be optics:

My guess is that the reason political scientists sometimes appear to be reform-averse is that there are a lot of very goofy reforms out there that can’t pass those tests. My guess is that I have something like a 50/1 ratio of reforms that I’ve read that I reject to those which I support…but that still leaves me supporting quite a few reforms.

I obviously can’t speak for others, but I suspect that you would find the same thing — a very large ratio of rejected to embraced reforms, but still quite a few reforms that they support.

I guess overall, I think that if someone makes a strong case for reform, many, and perhaps most, political scientists are open to listening. It’s just that we’ve often heard this turn before, and we know how it goes. Which, I’m sure, can make some of us (myself certainly included) seem dismissive at times, and that’s not a good thing at all. But an overall bias against reform? I’m just not sure it exists.

I’m willing to take on Andrew’s position directly: the vast, vast majority of proposed reforms are worthy of our disdain and — more to the point — reforms that do not have obvious, limited, and easy-to-measure consequences should be treated with the utmost skepticism, rather than as harmless alternatives that might be worth trying out. To argue for less skepticism of reform is, I think, logically the equivalent of arguing that more reform, on balance, would be good (or perhaps that most individual reforms, on balance, are good); and consequently also that the required threshold of consensus in order to enact reform should be lower. I disagree with each of those ideas, for both micro and macro reasons.

On the micro side, I agree with Bernstein’s point that most proposed reforms deserve our skepticism because most proposed reforms have massive and obvious flaws. Because they won’t have the intended effect, or because the intended effect is bad idea, or because they will have nasty unintended consequences. There are precious few reforms that dominate (i.e. are better in all respects) the existing arrangements; when such reforms arise, they are often quickly adopted. Everything else, to some degree, becomes a clash of assumptions, axioms, or values. And that’s the sad truth of most reforms: even when they improve things, they often do so by making very marginal improvements that are just net positives in a cost-benefit analysis, but still full of costs. And with high risk-to-return ratios.

On the macro side, I think there are distinct benefits to the existing institutional rules qua the existing rules. And while they may be far from perfect, I think they deserve some priority. I don’t disagree with Andrew or Jon when they say that neither the existing institutions nor the Founders have any particular claim on normative superiority of institutional design. But I think a strong Burkean conservatism is the safest and most effective disposition from which to evaluate proposed reform. For a few reasons.

First, unintended and/or dimly foreseen consequences are a bug, not a feature, of reform. Andrew appears to be hinting at the opposite view, arguing that even if we have a null analytical result on one primary dimension for a reform, it may have advantages on other dimensions, perhaps even ones we haven’t thought about. This is probably true, but, on balance, I think it’s an argument against most reforms; complexity of consequences should make us more skeptical, not more willing to tinker. For one, there’s a long-tail of unlikely but horrible consequences of any reform, up to and including systemic failure. We may not love current arrangements, but they are almost certainly better than the French Revolution. Even if it’s only a very, very small chance.

Of course, not every proposed reform carries systemic risk. But virtually all carry the risk of the unforeseen, and unless there is little or no worry about spillover effects (ex. your reform is to lower or raise the voting age by 1 or 2 years), these seem to me to be of primary concern. This to me is one of the clear lessons of institutional political science: there’s a butterfly effect for institutional change that seeps into everything. Adjust campaign fundraising laws and you have consequences for the centralization of power in the House and Senate. Limit the terms of legislators and you have consequences for the power of committees. Rationalize the annual budget/appropriations process and you empower the president and tighten his grip on the executive departments. And so on and so on. When combined with a political structure that makes reversing course quite difficult, the end result is that net-negative institutional reforms are sticky. Or more plainly: they are costly mistakes.

Second, political institutions rarely change in accordance with normative philosophical debates. Particularly in a democracy, both institutional design and institutional change are driven as much by short-term partisan or ideological benefit as they are by normative vision. Political actors tend to want to alter institutions instrumentally, not under the veil of ignorance. And so the normative arguments are almost always reduced to mere rationalizations for the short-term outcome positions held by existing interests. Any reform currently being peddled is likely backed as much by interests seeking outcome utility as by normative philosophy seeking improved systemic function or pareto-optimal equilibrium.

Finally, I think there’s something to be said for the stability of existing institutions and a slow pace of change. To not give priority to the existing arrangements is basically to ask to speed up the current pace of reform. But I do not see what good that accomplishes, and so I’ll take a status quo bias — institutional or cognitive — every day of the week.  The existing rules, regardless of flaws, allow political actors, interests, and citizens to plan their strategies for political fights on an even playing field; under a system that is open to, and characterized by, more rapid institutional reform, you are likely to encounter a different bias, toward those who can quickly adapt, rapidly mobilize, and easily adjust to new institutional structures and rules. In effect: existing, entrenched, monied interests.

Now, this is not to say that institutional change is inherently bad, or should never happen, or even that it should be as hard as it currently is to reform political institutions. I’m perfectly willing to take an agnostic view of the merits of the existing institutions vs. any particular reform. But the idea that the burden of proof should not lie with the reformer strikes me as counter to the basic market-test of institutional design: make me something better and we’ll talk. But for now, the existing widget beats your unproven idea. In the world of invention, no one pays anything for great ideas. They want prototypes that work. Such should be our attitude toward institutional design and reform.

Nothing  — and I mean nothing — better captures the DC chattering class at its speculative worst than the Veepstakes. And that’s saying something. It’s not just that most of the speculation is baseless. And it’s not that most of it is utterly inane. It’s that, from an electoral standpoint, it just doesn’t matter. As I’ve mused about before, it’s entirely possible that the effects of VP selection on the election outcome is normally zero, except in cases of extreme blunder. As is the case with so many things like this, the best places to read about the Veepstakes are at the political science blogs, where the Veepstakes-type articles are set aside (or at least toned down) and people are thinking about this institutionally. Andrew Gellman had a nice quick post the other day; Jon Bernstein has been making a series of smart points on the topic. Here’s what I’d add to the discussion, which I promise is devoid of Veepstakes conjecture.

People tend to forget that both sides get to pick a vice-presidential candidate, and therefore the potential advantage gained is not an absolute, but instead a net, number. If I can get Henry Clay below me on my ticket, that’s pretty awesome. But not if you have Ulysses S. Grant on yours. And so while you obviously want to maximize the marginal positive effect of your candidate, you have to accept that the actual overall effect is going to be highly dependent on a choice over which you have no control. So most of the time you are best off just picking someone ultra safe and vetted, and hoping that your opponent makes a major mistake. But don’t get your hopes up. Yes, your opponent can screw up (i.e. Palin 2008), but it takes a pretty darn egregious vetting error. There are just far too many people who pass the “bad choice, poor candidate, but not enough voters care to make the net advantage a marginal difference in the election” test. It’s just really tough to make the direct electoral value-added argument when you are talking about a few percentage points — at most — in one or two states. And again, that’s as a net effect balanced against the few percentage points in some other state that your opponent is grabbing.

In fact, I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that VP selection has never altered the binary outcome of the presidential election in the United States. This isn’t to say that picks haven’t been made with the thought that they might cover the difference. (The GOP in 1864 comes instantly to mind, when they replaced a moderate but absolutely orthodox anti-slavery Republican from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin, with a War Democrat from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.) The point is that the marginal net effect of [the winning VP candidate minus the losing VP candidate] has probably never put a ticket over the top. Or at least there’s no proof it has. As it turned out, Lincoln didn’t need a War Democrat on the ticket to get over the top in ’64. And everyone likes to say that LBJ delivered the South in 1960, but it’s not an obvious case: Kennedy did worse in the South than Stevenson had done in ’56, so the logic only holds if you can demonstrate that either LBJ radically minimized the segregationist/anti-catholic flight to Byrd or that Nixon was poised to win electoral votes the deep south ex ante in ’60. I’m more than happy to listen, but I’m skeptical on both counts.

Of course, there are other, indirect considerations that might make the choice important. VP candidates could be awesome fundraisers. Or come with great organizational setups and connections. Or be incredible persuasive when assembling interest coalitions. But there’s no reason to think anyone has all that much of a comparative advantage on any of these dimensions, regardless of the absolute magnitude of the effect such advantages might convey on their own (which, I think, is quite small anyway). And, yes, there are clear secondary electoral reasons, too: VP candidates can satisfy wings of a party that are disgruntled with the presidential nominee, or they can play to ethnicity or race or gender or other ascriptive vote-getting techniques. And, of course, they can fill in policy or background voids of the candidate at the top of the ticket. But again, there’s no reason to believe these things add much, if anything, to the electoral strength of the ticket.

Still, there’s one situation in which a VP candidate can have a huge effect: if the President ends up dead. I don’t mean that as a joke. We’re in the 56th presidential term in the history of our nation. Eight out of the previous 55 have resulted in dead president (WHH, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, Kennedy). That’s just under 15%. Over 16% if you add in Nixon’s resignation as a 9th instance (which, I think, is probably slightly different since the President’s decision to resign might be somewhat endogenous to the VP heir, but nonetheless completely defensible to include). The resulting Presidencies of those VP’s, I think, were mostly unlikely to occur on their own. There’s just no imaginable way that Andrew Johnson was going to end up President on his own accord, and I think that’s probably also true of Tyler, Arthur, Coolidge, and Truman. TR, LBJ, and Fillmore were certainly players in the game, but even they were far from likely future Presidents. And short of circumstance, Jerry Ford would have died a respected but mostly-forgotten Congressman from Michigan.

And, like all Presidents, those 9 men left their mark on the office and on the country. And to varying degrees, those marks were different than the marks that would have been left by a completed regular term of the dead president and the subsequent next few regular elections. In some cases vastly so. And thus to say that the selection of the VP is irrelevant, while certainly true in the instant electoral sense, is just plainly not true in the broader sense. Again, ask the Civil War Republicans. How many of them wish they had just sucked it up, taken the risk, and renominated the moderate, but strongly anti-slavery and definitely Republican, Hannibal Hamlin? I’ll tell you the answer: every last one of them. I’m pretty sure the Radicals would have taken Bill Buckley’s random draw from the Boston phone book over Johnson.

And this points us to a blind spot that political parties, I think, have in these circumstances: they overvalue the relative importance of the short-term electoral benefits from VP selection in contrast to the potential impact of the vice-president on the fortune of the party in the case of a dead president. There’s certainly merit in doing every last thing you can to maximize your chance of winning the next presidential election, but when taken to the extreme, you can end up in the Andrew Johnson situation. Granted, those were desperate times, an extreme example, and perhaps a justifiable move under circumstance. But the same rationale can be applied to any election. Unless you honestly believe that 2 percentage points in one state is going to make or break the election, you are probably better off  picking a nominee who fits squarely into your ideological vision and whom you can see yourself backing in the next election. (This holds for a party and its activists, at least; I’m less certain about this from the point of view of an individual presidential candidate, although I think it still holds.)

Now, most current VP candidates fulfill this need. The GOP tends to pick VP candidates from the mainstream of their party, and the Democrats do likewise. But I think the typical party (and chattering class) goals — pick a person who “balances” the ticket, or adds some geographic pull, or shakes up the narrative — are wrongly prioritized over the more basic idea of picking someone who would be a competent President and a compelling leader for the party and its ideological goals if they were at the top of the ticket. Because there’s a serious chance — much higher than most people assign at any rate — of them actually being the President at some point in the following eight years. It seems to me the biggest VP selection mistakes are made precisely when the decision deviates from the dimension of “best president if it came to that.”

And that’s also why I try to never make “warm bucket of piss”*** jokes about the vice-presidency. It’s less apt than it appears. Unless you are a serious first-flight contender not in your virgin go-around, being vice-president is probably a more likely route to the Presidency than entering the party primaries. Which sort of explains why everyone makes fun of the vice-presidency, but people rarely turn down nomination to it.

***I refuse to use the sanitized “warm bucket of spit” line, since I think the evidence is clear than Garner said, and meant, “piss.” And the original is way funnier. This is politics, not children’s television, folks.

Previous Venn Diagrams

SCOTUS

Antonin Scalia, 4/4/12

John Roberts, 3/30/12

Clarence Thomas, 3/29/12

GOP CANDIDATES

Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11

Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11

Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up

Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11

Rick Perry, 12/23/11

Herman Cain, 12/25/11

Rick Santorum, 12/28/11

Ron Paul, 12/31/11

One thing I didn’t delve into too deeply in my post reviewing the committee funding process was how committees spend their money. Let’s do that quickly right now.

First off, you don’t have to leave your computer to check it out for yourself. You might recall that the Committee on House Administration (CHA) has jurisdiction and oversight responsibilities for funding to the House standing committee (with the exception of the Committee on Appropriations.) Consequently, CHA also has the power to regulate use of committee funds, and such regulations are published in the Committee Handbook. One of the regulations placed on the standing committees is a monthly reporting requirement:

Monthly Reports

Each committee must submit to the Committee on House Administration, by the 18th of each month, an original and two copies of a report signed by the Committee Chair on the activities of the committee during the preceding month.

1. Summary of the progress of the specific investigations and studies for which funds were approved.
2. Statement of expenses for the month and year to date. Committees must reconcile their figures with the Monthly Financial Statement prior to submitting the monthly reports.
3. Report of travel performed.
4. List of committee employees, job titles and gross monthly salaries (a copy of the monthly Payroll Certification Form is acceptable).
5. Certification by the Chair of the reporting committee that the report is available to Members of the committee for examination.

Monthly reports for each committee will be available for public inspection at the Committee on House Administration.

Best part: they were always available for public inspection at CHA, but as of the 112th Congress, they are now all available online. Second best part: the expenditures information is both thorough and easy to understand. (I’m leaving aside the other stuff in the reports, but that can be interesting too). If you are trying to get a feel for the committee system on the Hill, a 15-minute browse through the monthly reports of 1 or 2 committees is a good way to do it.

Let’s take the Agriculture Committee as an example. If we look at their December 2011 report, we can not only get a snapshot of how they spent their money for the month, but we’ll also get to see the entire 2011 expenditure picture. What do we see?

1. The total balance sheet (pg. 2). The Committee was authorized $6,189,494 for calendar year 2011 under the primary expense resolution (H.Res.147), but spent only $4,933,201.89 of that as of the December report, leaving a balance of $1,256,292.11 for the year (although some obligations such as equipment purchases may not be disbursed until the following year, so it’s not as much left over as you might think). December spending was similar to other months, with $456,366.26 spent.

2. The monthly and YTD breakdown (pg. 3). This shows expenditures by category: Personnel Compensation, Travel, Communications/Utilities, Printing and Reproduction, Other Services, Supplies and Materials, and Equipment. You can see that in December, the Ag Committee spent $432,083.66 on staff pay, or  95% of its expenditures, which is similar to its 94% rate for the entire year. The Committee spent only $107k on communications, $103k on services, $56k on materials, and $15k on travel in 2011. The equipment total of just under $5k is somewhat misleading; many committees don’t end up paying for their equipment purchases until the following year, due to the acquisition and billing cycles.

3. Franked mail expenditures (pg. 5-6). Like all the other committees, Ag is authorized $5,000 in franked mailings. And like almost all the other committees, it uses virtually none. In December, it spent $1.72 on franked mail. This money comes out of the official mail allowance account of the House, not out of the committees funding authorization.

4. Expenditures off of last year’s authorization (pg. 7-9). These will almost always be equipment and services, since nothing little else — and virtually no pay (except in January of the new year) could be obligated off of old funds but not disbursed for months and months.

5. Majority Staff Payroll Certification. (pg. 11-13). Here we get to see every majority employee of the committee, their annual salary, and what they got paid in December.  On the summary sheet, we can see that ther are 34 majority staffers, who made a total of $269,637 in December. We can also see the job descriptions of the staff, and that they are generally well-paid, in comparison to personal office staff. The average majority annual salary is north of $85k, with 16 of the staffers making over $100k, and the staff assistants making $38k.

6. Minority Staff Payroll Certification (pg. 14-15). Same snapshot, but for the minority. Twelve staffers total, receiving a total of $162,446 in December.  We can also see that the minority staff is paid very well; by keeping a relatively small staff, every minority staffer is making over $150k.

What can we learn from all this, big picture? A few quick thoughts. One, it illustrates some of the differences between the Member offices and the committees. The committees have both more money to spend, and less need to spend it on things like travel and franked mail. Therefore, they have more resources to expend on staff, which translates not only into more staffers, but generally better paid staff. Second, the consequences that flow from this are quite obvious: with more and better-paid staff but less constituent-oriented responsibilities, the committees are in much better position to generate policy. When combined with their rules-based advantage as gatekeepers against bills developed within their jurisdiction by outsiders, the incentive structure of the House strongly tilts against the writing of large or substantial bills in the Member personal offices.

Previous Venn Diagrams

SCOTUS

John Roberts, 3/30/12

Clarence Thomas, 3/29/12

GOP CANDIDATES

Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11

Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11

Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up

Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11

Rick Perry, 12/23/11

Herman Cain, 12/25/11

Rick Santorum, 12/28/11

Ron Paul, 12/31/11

Yesterday, I discussed the explosion of inbound email to Congress, and some of its possible impacts, particularly the way it alters a congressional office’s representational relationship with citizens and potentially has a nationalizing effect on politics, because of the difficulty of filtering out constituents from non-constituents. I don’t want to make too much of this, however, for a few reasons. First, it would be vastly overstating the case to say that email is nationalizing congressional politics. If it is having an effect — which we don’t really know, after all we’re just theorizing here based on some aggregate statistics and anecdotal evidence — the effect is a marginal one, and almost certainly pales in comparison to other nationalizing forces in congressional politics.

Second, I kind of (purposefully) set up of a strawman yesterday when I said there isn’t a sorting algorithm for constituent email. As most interns on the Hill know (and as several emailed to remind me yesterday!), there are techniques for filtering out non-constituent email. A little background: almost every congressional office uses a Correspondence Management System (CMS) to process constituent communications, the most popular being Intranet Quorum (IQ). The CMS has a database of all district constituents, and allows you to input all aspects of a constituent mailing — date, subject category, opinion, response, etc. — for the purpose of tracking both individual and district-wide communications data.

So one way to filter the emails — which almost all offices try to do now —  is to force constituents to fill out a web form when sending an email to the office that includes their address. That way, you can cross-check it with the CMS and determine whether the sender is a constituent. Of course, there are problems with this. First, it doesn’t work when people skip the web form and directly email staffers by finding out the email address of the LA on their topic of interest. Second, it requires the web form, which may dissuade actual constituents from writing. Third, it can be beaten relatively easily by anyone who really wants to flood Congress with opinion mail; whereas the old postal sorting system could only be beaten by postmarking stuff from each district, a strategic emailer needs only harvest an address from a district.

The end result is that a lot of the representational promise of email from the mid-90′s has not been borne out. At the outset of the email explosion, many people thought it might be a possible source of data for an office, one that could provide a good guide to district opinion. But at this point, it has largely become something that needs to be managed. The low cost of sending an email has resulted not in more useful communication from constituents, but just more work for interns and staff assistants to make sure that every constituent gets a timely response to their inquiry. And so the largest effect of the inbound email explosion has been on the structuring of the congressional offices: more low-level staffers than ever are assigned to correspondence work, but paradoxically the correspondence itself is of less value to the office.

Now, some will say this was always true of the postal mail. That its value to the office was entirely negative, it only created work in making sure that constituents got timely responses, and that the ideal point for any office was to receive zero constituent mail. Undoubtedly, in many cases that was (and is) true. If you are a solid pro-choice Representative, the only thing that pro-life mail does is generate staff work and resource costs in logging the CMS, printing out the form response for “pro-life constituent position inquiry,” and paying the postage to mail the response.

But I can also clearly remember instances of the mail being used to measure the balance of intense district opinion over hot issues. I worked for a conservative Democrat in 1998, who was very torn on impeachment. We tracked every district letter we received for three weeks leading up to the vote, and the fact that they were 70/30 against impeachment made a strong impression on the staff and my boss.And that’s something that I don’t think is possible with the email. Or at least not as possible as it used to be. And so ffices are left in an odd situation: many of them like to “see what the mail says” when they are thinking about hot legislative decisions, but the mail (and the phone calls in the age of cell phones and free long distance) is less representative of the constituency than it used to be.

But leave all this aside, because what I want to talk about today is the other side of the email explosion — the email and other electronic communications sent out of the congressional offices. I don’t think there’s any question that this side of the equation is not only fundamentally changing how congressional offices think about their constituent communication strategies, but also having a marginal effect on the nationalization of congressional politics, by offering Members the capacity to reach a national constituency that did not previously exist. And in the right circumstances, many Members might find strong incentives  to seek such national constituency. Now, we don’t want to go to far with this thinking; Members still get elected in districts by local constituents, and that’s always going to create an overwhelming incentive to focus on the geographic district first.

So with that caveat in mind, here are five points:

1. Electronic communications are different than old-school mail in three important ways. First, they have very low marginal costs. Sending franked mail to the district not only incurs a fixed marginal cost per letter, but also comes directly out of the Representative’s MRA in the House; any time you send a sizeable mass mailing to your district, it eats into the budget that could be used for staff or other resources. Electronic communications — be it email, social media, tele-townhalls, web advertisements, etc. — tend to have fixed capital or startup costs, but are then largely free on the margin.

Second, congressional offices are not limited as to who they can contact with electronic communications. Following a federal court action (Coalition to End the Permanent Government v. Marvin T. Runyon, et al., 979 F.2d 219 (D.C.Cir. 1992)), the Rules of the House were amended to restrict Members from sending franked mail outside of their districts. So it’s not even possible to reach a wider-than-district audience with postal mail. Electronic communications, however, are not so limited. Members can build email subscriber lists — many offer such subscriptions immediately upon entering their website — and the use of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allow Members to broadcast and interact with a potential constituency far wider than their geographic district, if they want.

Finally, electronic communications are fast. This is obvious, but it has important ramifications for how congressional offices choose to use it and how it shapes their communications strategy. Once upon a time, if you wanted to send out a tick-tock on the movement of a policy of interest through the floor, the only outlet was more or less to fax a press release to any newspaper that might listen, which invariably meant the local newspapers in your district. There was no point in trying to send postal mail directly to constituents at that speed. Now, however, you can tick-tock floor activity or other business to subscribed email lists or social media instantly, and if you want to send unsolicited mass communications to non-subscribed citizens, the lack of printing time and postal costs let you move them quickly through the franking commission and out the door.

2. The use of franked mail is at record-lows; the use of electronic communications has skyrocketed. The above is all great in theory, but what’s actually happening on the ground? Well, for one, the total cost franked mail coming out of Congress (adjusted for inflation) is at its lowest point since Congress began reimbursing the Post Office for congressional mail costs in fiscal year 1954. In nominal dollars, franked mail costs are down to $12.8 million in FY2011, from a high of over $113 million in FY1988.

Now, the steep decline in mail costs between the late 80′s and the mid 90′s was due mostly to two reforms: public disclosure of mail costs for individual Members, and direct charging of Members’ budgets for the cost of mail they send, instead of allowing unlimited mailings from a common funding source. But there’s a more telling decrease in mail costs in the last eight years, which is somehwhat masked in the chart. Here are the odd-year mail costs from FY2003 to FY 2011:

FY2003: $19.3 million

FY2005: $17.5 million

FY2007: $17.5 million

FY2009: $16.8 million

FY2011: $12.8 million

That’s a 33% drop in just five cycles. And comes during a period when the price of a stamp (which is a rough measure of postal cost inflation) went from 37 cents to 44 cents, more than a 20% increase.

(As an aside, the pattern persists of more mail being spent in even-numbered fiscal years than in odd-numbered years. While many observers have attributed this to the increase in mail sent prior to the elections, the truth is actually more complicated than that. The single month with the most mail sent during any Congress is almost always the December of the first year, as many Members send out end-of-session newsletters. By quirk of the fiscal calendar, which start in October, that means that the two peak months of franked mailing — December of the odd-year and the more modest increase in the two months before the pre-election cutoff in the even-number year (June and July) — happen to fall in the same fiscal year, distorting the stats. If you go by calendar year, there is almost no difference between election-year and non-election year mail totals, as the two peaks cancel each other out. I will do a full blog post on this someday.)

Well, how about the other side of the coin – what has happened to electronic communications coming out of Congress? We don’t have quite as fine-grained data as we do on the postal side, but we have a good proxy: the volume of “mass communications” (defined by the House as “unsolicited communication of substantially identical content to 500 or more persons in a session of Congress” which includes things like mass unsolicited emails, web or print advertisements, radio spots, newspaper inserts, etc. the House has been tracking this data since FY2009. Basically anything you send unsolicited to a whole bunch of people. The chart below shows the volume of quarterly mass postal mailings in the House from 1997 to 2008, and then the quarterly volume of all mass communications (which include postal mailing) from 2009 to 2011.

This graph should be striking. Mass postal mail volumes follow a familiar pattern of peaking in the last quarter of the first year of each Congress (from the December newsletters) and then again in the period preceding the election, and then drop off in the prohibited period (late 3rd quarter and early 4th quarter of election years) and the lame duck 4th quarter of a Congress as well as the 1st quarter of a new Congress. In the first Congress in which mass communications were tracked — the 111th, 2009-2010, a similar pattern was observed, albeit at a naturally greater scale (since mass communications are inclusive of mass mailings). But then in 2011, in the first session of the 112th Congress, the mass communications simply explode, to something like approaching 10 times the volume of mas communications sent in the first quarter of 2009.

My instincts tell me this isn’t due to radically-increased use of mass faxes or mass newspaper inserts. This is almost certainly electronic communications of the internet age, taking off for real out of congressional offices. I have not examined the data carefully yet at the individual level, but I think there’s good theoretical reasons to believe that a lot of it can be attributed to two things: first, the influx of 90+ new House Members, most of whom have come to politics in the information age. Second, and related, is the effect of the 2010 election, in which social media and electronic communication played a large role in both campaign information dissemination and fundraising strategies. Freshmen Members are arriving in Congress already electronically plugged-in to large networks of constituents and non-constituents through email lists, Facebook accounts, Twitter feeds, and other media. In short, times are changing and young replacement Members are most savvy to it. That would be my guess, at least.

Anyway, with the outbound data trends out of the way, let’s get back to the more speculative talk about the impact this might be having representation:

3. The opportunities for surrogate representation have seemingly incrased. In her excellent APSR article, Jane Mansbridge defines surrogate representation as happening when Members represent constituents outside their district. In the traditional formulation, this often happens around specific issues with dispersed national constituencies: Dennis Kucinich representing anti-war advocates, Barney Frank representing gay rights advocates, and so forth. My sense is that, twenty years ago, very few Members were engaged in such surrogate activities. They simply did not have the resource capacity. Members were (and still are) of course barred from sending franked postal mail outside of their districts. The only way to get a national audience was to get on TV — which usually meant having at least the power of a committee chair, or doing something extraordinarily provocative. And it would have been crazy to suggest spending any significant portion of campaign money on outside-the-district activities.

Today, the entire playing field has been rearranged. Even backbench Members can seek a national followings with relative ease, and at virtually no cost. The Internet, and in particular the social media application like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook, have zero marginal cost. One can stake out an issue, make a concerted effort to become a national leader on the issue, and have some chance of success, all without expending pretty much any marginal resources. The upside is clear: national leadership on issue means a higher political profile both inside and outside the House, more campaign fundraising opportunities, and (lest we forget) greater opportunity to influence public policy. My sense is that Members are beginning to alter their representational strategies around these facts: connecting themselves to national movements, inserting themselves into national policy debates more often, and modifying their fundraising strategies to more optimistically look for out-of-district money. And the more that Members engage in surrogate representation, the less they engage in traditional district representation.

4. There may be electoral pressure to nationalize representation. But it goes deeper than this. Electoral challengers may be nationalizing their representation, too. Why wouldn’t they? If a Twitter townhall  focused on a national issue or a viral youtube clip can expand your potential fundraising base, get your name in faraway papers, and maybe get you invited onto a cable news show, there’s almost no incentive not to do it. Add on that nationalizing a challenger campaign can create an army of pseudo-activists to target the incumbent and its a no-brainer. And thus Members choosing not to undertake a new media strategy might at a serious disadvantage. And pretty much any new media strategy is inherently a nationalized strategy from a infrastructure perspective.

5. Such trends would be in conflict with the basic electoral logic and Fenno-esque model of constituent relations. Certain things have not changed. The most important, of course, is that only people in the district can vote. But there are other important things too: district offices have to be in the district, franked mail still can only go to the district, and so forth. So the electoral connection, and most of the resources available to maintain it, are still tied squarely to the district. And this means that Members will always be tied, first and foremost, to the district. The largest Fenno constituency that the Member has — the geographic constituency — still rules. But it may not be the largest constituency the Member sees anymore when he looks bak home from Washington. The national constituency may now enter his or her thinking — whether he wants it or not; whether he knows it or not — in a way that fundamentally rearranges the lens through which he sees his district.

This has potential implications. The most important thing that comes to mind is that the Member may greater incentives now than ever to try and shape his district in a more national mold. This would be akin to Mansbridge’s idea of “educating” the constituency under an anticipatory representation model. But it might just be a Member choosing to frame issues in the district in a national way, or choosing to emphasize national over local issues when communicating to the district.

6. But the constituents themselves may be nationalizing. Nationalizing their representational profile, of course, is also potentially dangerous from a Member perspective. As Mayhew writes in The Electoral Connection, Members treat national partisan or ideological swings as acts of god that they can’t control; they instead focus on what they can control, mostly district-related things. To tie one’s fortunes to the national party is to place one’s future in someone else’s hands. But this may dovetail with what is happening to constituents: it’s not crazy to suggest that voters themselves are nationalizing as well. And if that’s the case, then Members may be forced into a national representational context, one that affords them less safety from trends they cannot control.

Now, again, we don’t want to go overboard here. The electronic communications are at best having a marginal effect on nationalization of politics or transformation of Member offices, and the effect is almost certainly indirect if anything: by increasing the capacity of Members to nationalize, it offers a greater strategic menu of options to Members who might want to go that route. But working in concert with other nationalizing forces — the centralization of party power in Congress, the nationalization of fundraising, the breakdown of local and regional media structures, etc. — I think it may be playing a bigger role than is currently appreciated.

[This is part 1 of a two part post; for part 2 click here]

It’s no secret that the Internet has radically transformed the practice of legislative politics on Capitol Hill. Information is everywhere, and moves like lightning. And so I’m going to spend a few days writing some quick posts about one dimension of the change — changes to constituent communication — which is exemplary of the bigger picture of technological changes on the Hill.

Despite the somewhat obvious nature of the basic thesis — the information explosion has altered many aspects of legislative politics — people sometimes underestimate the magnitude of the change. After all, some of the trappings of the Hill give off the appearance of an institution and a culture that strongly defies technological change. Official politics still takes place face to face, both on the floor and in committee, in their office; Members still physically walk from their offices to the floor in order to debate and cast votes; and heck, the Senate still votes by calling the roll, no different than they did in the 18th century. The visible practice of politics, as seen on C-SPAN or gleaned from walking around the Hill,  is hardly different than it was in 1960. Or 1860, for that matter.

But below the surface, things have radically changed. Members no longer seek information so much as look for better ways to sort and filter it. Staffers are no longer chained to their desks and their hard-line telephones. And, perhaps most importantly, the relay of information from the Hill to the rest of the country (and vice-versa) has been reduced, time-wise, to basically zero. As soon as it happens here, it’s known everywhere. And not only is the information relay faster after something happens, but the outside, non-Hill world feels closer to the policy-making process before anything happens. And that has consequences.

And the most basic consequence is that which corresponds to the most basic feature of a legislature: the representation of a body of constituents by an elected individual, and the communicative relationship between the constituents, the representative, the election, and the political and policy decisions the representative makes. To which I present figure 1, which plots incoming mail to the House and Senate since 1996, as a function of delivery medium. The top line (black) is incoming emails, the bottom line (red) incoming postal mail.

If you don’t work in politics, this graph is probably pretty striking. If you do, it’s probably either familiar or terrifying, or both. Members of Congress interact with constituents in a variety of ways: in person, both in their districts and in Washington; over the phone when people call their offices; and through the mailing of letters. We can’t say for sure how many people a Member meets in person or how many phone calls come to the Hill each day. But I think it’s safe to say that, traditionally, neither of those forms of communication ate up nearly as much time as the mail did in a congressional office. The mail comes three times a day in Congress, and it’s unrelenting.

At least that’s my recollection from 1998, when I was a lowly intern in the House and spent much of my day opening it. And so it makes me shudder to think that, back then, the postal mail was still the majority of mail that came to Congress. Since then, of course, it has fallen (about 16% less postal mail incoming to the House since 1998, down from about 15 million pieces to about 12 million pieces). But it’s been replaced by three hundred million emails. In fact, postal mail is now just 7% of all mail coming to the Hill. And that 7% is actually 100% of the mail that was coming in 1994. Terrifying.

A few things worth discussing:

1. First, some technical details. Email was first available and used on the Hill in late 1994 or 1995. No hard data exists on total usage prior to 1996, and data for 1996 and 1997 are only estimates. Second, incoming postal mail does not include mail sent to district offices, just mail sent to the Capitol complex in Washington; email volumes include all mail sent to House or Senate email addresses, regardless of end-user location.

2. More technical stuff. The email numbers are post-spam filters (i.e. only mail that actually reached end-users). This makes them slightly difficult to compare year to year, since the spam filters (as well as the spam senders) have gotten dramatically better over the years. In fact, the large peak in 2007 and the drop-off following it are almost certainly do to the explosion of more intelligent spam and the corresponding adoption of powerful new and improved spam filters in both chambers that year. The lesson, as always, is that these numbers represent a trend, not precise reflections of reality, and should be treated with that in mind. Especially since the spam filter for postal mail — an intern throwing the junk mail in the garbage can — has not changed during the period.

3. With postal mail, it was always easy to know if you were being written to by a constituent or by someone from outside your district. The rule of thumb for sorting such mail is typically something like this: if it’s a constituent or interest group from our district, put it in the pile for things that we will promptly respond to; if it’s a constituent from outside our district, put it in another pile for things that we will promptly deliver to the correct office; if it’s a interest group from outside our district, look through it quickly and see if it’s personal or a form letter / mass spamming. If it’s the former, consider responding. If it’s the latter, definitely trash it.

The problem with email, though, is that you can’t tell if the sender is from the district or not. And there are quite obvious incentives to not exclude anyone who might be a constituent. And so the incoming email has a tendency to nationalize the constituent communications techniques used in most Member offices; there’s just isn’t a sorting algorithm that  lets you separate your constituents from other citizens.*** Which means that the information context Members are facing in their offices is much more national in scope, even after they’ve tried to filter it. This has consequences. For one, it forces a complete rethinking of an office communications strategy. But it also distorts one’s perspective of district opinion, and tends to orient Members toward national public policy; people from outside the district are much more likely to communicate about policy issues than distributive politics such as grants or earmarks. More on this tomorrow.

4. From an institutional point of view, one key consequence of this explosion is the pressure it puts on congressional staff. Constituent and/or interest group service and communications is an important aspect of what goes on in Members’ personal office, but it is far from the only thing that goes on. To the degree that more staffers need to be allocated to the collection, processing, and responding tasks associated with incoming communications, the less staff time that there can be allocated to policy or other work, or the longer hours staffers need to put in. And while the number of staffers working in personal offices has increased modestly in the last generation (about 6% increase in Representatives’ offices since 1982), the prospects for a significant future increase — namely the proposition of a substantial increase in the Representatives’ MRAs or the Senators’ SOPOEA — seem quite dim.

*** This was (somewhat) sloppy writing, to make a point. I probably should have said “definitively lets you separate,” since there are certainly methods to filter out some non-constituents, the most popular being the IQ CMS software. I address the pros/cons of IQ in my followup post. The most important problem is that while IQ easily filters out people who weren’t trying to send you non-constituent mail, it is easily and routinely beaten by those who are strategically and purposefully sending mail disguised as constituent mail.

[Citations for appeals to common sense here and here (Chertoff), here (maj. op. pg 11) and here (Roberts), here (Paine).]

Previous Venn Diagrams

SCOTUS

Clarence Thomas, 3/29/12

GOP CANDIDATES

Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11

Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11

Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up

Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11

Rick Perry, 12/23/11

Herman Cain, 12/25/11

Rick Santorum, 12/28/11

Ron Paul, 12/31/11

Previous Venn Diagrams

Michele Bachmann, 12/22/11

Newt Gingrich , 12/19/11

Jon Huntsman, Jr., 12/20/11Up

Willard Mitt Romney, 12/21/11

Rick Perry, 12/23/11

Herman Cain, 12/25/11

Rick Santorum, 12/28/11

Ron Paul, 12/31/11

[updated to reflect first comment]

There’s not a week that goes by in which I don’t end up debunking some urban legend about congressional perks. That Members don’t pay social security. Or that they get free tax advice. Or that they get free health care. Or whatever. Virtually none of it is true, as we will see below.

Well, at least not true anymore. Once upon a time, there were a fair number of things that could be classified as Member perks. Right through the 1980s, in fact. But in the wake of the House Banking Scandal, the House Post Office Scandal, and the 1992 election — perhaps the only true anti-incumbent congressional election ever, save 1854 —  the perks were more or less eliminated. In fact, for all the solid, institution professionalizing reforms that the GOP instituted in 1995 (which I still believe is their most important positive legacy), the period between 1990 and 1995 was also a highwater mark for reform efforts, particularly those aimed at cleaning up the image of the institution.

And I’m reminded of a story former Speaker Carl Albert tells in his 1990 autobiography, which so perfectly captures the old-school mindset about these sorts of perks.  The story is about 32-year Representative Tom Steed (D-OK). Steed was confronted by the local paper in Oklahoma about his taking of congressional perks, including flying first-class back and forth from his district to DC. Steed supposedly responded, “What the hell, I’m a first-class Congressman.” And in the autobiography, Speaker Albert doesn’t knock Steed. Quite to the contrary, he applauds him. “He was a first-class Congressman.” And so times change.

Here are some common perk questions I get asked, and the answers to them:

Do Members pay Social Security?

Yes. Prior to 1984, federal civil service employees didn’t pay social security, nor did they receive social security benefits. Instead, they had a separate retirement plan, the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). Under P.L. 98-21, federal employees hired after 1983 had to pay social security, and all Members (regardless of when first elected) have to pay social security. Since CSRS wasn’t designed to interact with Social Security, federal employees (including Members) who began service after 1984 were eligible for a new retirement system, the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS).

Do Members receive free or reduced rate health care while serving?

Incumbent and retired Members are eligible for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) under the same terms as other federal employees.  The cost of the premiums are split between the employees and the federal government. The current formula comes from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-33), which sets the government contribution at 72% of the average premium of all plans  but no more than 75% of the premium of any individual plan. By comparison, according to the Department of Labor, private sector employers’ share for coverage is 81% for individual coverage and 71% for family coverage.

Do Members receive reduced rates for services of the attending physician?  Do Members receive reduced rate prescription drugs?

For an annual fee ($503 in 2010), Members can get basic health services from the Office of the Attending Physician in the U.S. Capitol and five other Capitol Hill locations. Dependent care is not included, nor is surgery, maternity care, dental care, or eyeglasses. Prescriptions may be written, but not filled, except for starter doses and emergencies. In the past, Members were eligible for services, including prescriptions, of the attending physician at no charge. In 1992, both the House and Senate eliminated the prescription benefit and instituted annual fees for the services.

Do retired Members get reduced-rate medical care?

No. They receive the same benefits as other federal employees:  a one-time election to continue  in FEHBP as a retiree, assuming they have been in it for five years and are eligible for an annuity.

Do retired Members get special pensions?

Sort of. Members can participate, as do other federal workers, in either the CSRS (if they were elected prior to 1984) or the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS). The only difference between Members and other federal workers is that Members (as well as congressional staffers) have slightly higher contributions to the retirement systems, but are eligible for slightly higher benefits at slightly lower ages, with somewhat shorter vesting requirements. The rationale behind this is that congressional employees — be it Members or staffers — have somewhat less job security and therefore less certainty about their tenure.

Do Members receive reduced rate life insurance?

Members can participate in the Federal Employees’ Group Life Insurance Program (FEGLI) under the same terms as other federal employees.

Do Members receive reduced rates for use of the Capitol gym or other athletic facilities?

Both the House and Senate maintain a private gym for Members’ use. The annual fee for Members is about $250.

Can Members obtain free tax help from the IRS?

Until the 1990s, both the House and Senate opened temporary tax assistance offices to answer questions regarding tax return preparation. These offices were open to the general public and available for anyone to use, although by dint of their location, the services naturally were enjoyed mostly by Members and congressional staff. In 1994, the House discontinued the practice. The Senate discontinued the practice a year later.

Do Members receive reduced rates for use of Capitol restaurants, dry cleaning services, or barber/beauty shops?

Capitol restaurants, dry-cleaning vendors, and beauty/barber shops provide services at prices comparable to market rates. Some services — such as the House barber shop and beauty salon — have been privatized; others remain publicly run. Prior to changes made between 1992 and 1994, these services were often available at reduced rates. Members, however, have never received official rates that differed from staffers or from the general public.

Do Members have the option of buying furnishings from their House or Senate offices when they cease being Members of Congress?

In the House, departing Members can buy a standard Member desk and chair from their Washington, DC, office. The cost of the desk is  approximately $1,000 and the chair $500. Under House Administration Committee regulations, Members-elect may choose to acquire any furnishings and equipment currently located and in use in their predecessors’ district offices. Any furniture and equipment not selected and retained for use by them, may be purchased by outgoing Members.

In the Senate, departing Senators may purchase office equipment located in their Washington, DC, or state offices, subject to certain restrictions. They may purchase only one of each type of equipment, and it must have reached the end of its expected useful life and been declared surplus to the needs of the Senate by the Sergeant at Arms at least 30 days prior to the end of a Senator’s tenure. A departing Senator may also purchase his or her Senate chamber chair. Within 30 days of leaving office, a departing Senator has the option to purchase any furnishings provided by the General Services Administration (GSA) in one home state office. The purchase shall be at depreciated fair market value prices and in accordance with regulations prescribed by GSA.

Do Members receive special parking privileges at Reagan National Airport or Dulles International Airport?

Members have received free parking in preferred lots at Reagan Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport since the facilities opened in 1941 and 1962, respectively. However, this benefit is not specified in statute; the parking spaces are provided as a courtesy by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. A legislative attempt to explicitly deny the benefit was defeated in the Senate in 1994 (S. Amdt. 1632 to S. 540, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess., Apr. 20, 1994).

Are there really free ice deliveries to Member offices on Capitol Hill?

Not anymore. It was discontinued in 1995.

Can you get a free or really cheap carwash in the Capitol Hill parking garages?

Not anymore. They were discontinued in the Senate in 1991 and in the House the following year.

Isn’t Congress exempt from civil rights and labor laws and such?

Nope. The 1995 Congressional Accountability Act applies 13 major workplace safety and other occupational laws to Congress, which previously did not apply to the legislative branch. One exception is the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, there’s a good reason for that: it may very well be unconstitutional to apply it; the speech and debate clause may prohibit it.

Do Members get to send constituent mail, and drive in fancy cars, and fly around the country, all for free?

Not really, and certainly not compared to how they used to. Once upon a time, Member travel and constituent mail costs were paid for in more or less unlimited amounts by the House. Members were given a certain number of trips they could take home to their district, but the cost of individual trips wasn’t really limited. Constituent mail was regulated as to what Members could send under the frank, but not how much. Even more to the point, Members did not have personal limits on how much mail they could send, nor did they have to disclose publicly how much they personally sent. It all came out of a general collective House account.

Contrast that with the system that emerged after a series of reforms were put in place between 1986 and 1998. Members may now travel to their district as often as they want, and they can still send as much franked mail as they want, but there are two general rules. First, all expenditures are now public. So every penny that Members spend on travel and/or franked mail is disclosed. Second, Members now have personal accounts (under the MRA system) from which all of their expenses are drawn. You can view the allowed and prohibited uses of the MRA here.

By formula, Members get roughly $1.4 million dollars each year in this account, which is used to pay their staff, buy office supplies, rent a district office, send mail, and travel. The upshot is that, unlike in the past, Members now have economic choices to make about franked mail and travel: every time you send franked mail or travel back to your district, you have less money to hire staff. The results of these reforms have been stunning: total franked mail expenditures in the House have decreased from over $77 million dollars in FY1988 under the old system, to just over $11 million in FY2011.

In effect, the combination of public disclosure and the market reform of fitting franked mail into the Members’ budgets has effectively incentivized more conservative budgetary behavior of Members. The larger point is that, yes, Members can still rent cars to use for official purposes, but the expenses for those rentals are now not only publicly disclosed, but also come at the cost of other possible uses of the money. Those two things won’t stop a determined Member from leasing a luxury car for official business if they really want to, but it does greatly disincentivize it. And I think it does take it out of the realm of perks.

Later this week, the House is scheduled to consider H.Con.Res. 112, the FY2013 Budget Resolution.

Well then. Congressional budgeting.

I’d like to discuss one particular institutional feature of the appropriations process — the 302(b) allocations of the Appropriations Committee — but in order to understand that, you need at least something like a bare-bones understanding of the overall congressional budget process, which is as complicated as anything else that occurs in the House and Senate. So let me take two paragraphs and try to succinctly lay out how it all works. If people are interested, perhaps I’ll do a Q & A style post later in the week on the overall process.

Ok. Bare-bones basic federal budget process in five sentences. At the beginning of a fiscal year, the agencies of the federal government begin developing their budgetary plans for the following fiscal year, which are aggregated and vetted by OMB and others in the President’s administration. Under law, the President is required to submit to Congress by early February a comprehensive Budget of the United States for the fiscal year that begins the following October 1. The budget includes proposals and an accounting of  incoming collections (revenue and offsetting) and spending (authority, obligations, and outlays), following standardized government accounting practices that have developed over the years. Under the Constitution, no money may be drawn from the Treasury except by appropriation made by law, and therefore Congress must either pass annual, multi-year, or obligation-creating laws that provide the budget authority requested by the President, or ignore the President, make their own budgetary judgements, and provide that amount of budget authority.  In addition, Congress must provide either a mechanism for revenue or other collections to cover the spending, or an authorization for the United States to incur debt.

Got it? Good. Bare-bones basic congressional budget process in five sentences. Beginning in 1974, Congress has enacted a series of laws and chamber rules that require legislators to adopt a resolution that sets for the aggregate levels of revenue, spending, deficit, and debt limit. Under law, the Budget Committee reports — and the chambers approve — a concurrent resolution that provides these budgetary projections or the upcoming fiscal year and future out-years, as well as mechanisms to constrain both direct spending (i.e. entitlement spending) and discretionary spending. Direct spending is controlled through the process of reconciliation instructions, which may instruct the standing committees that have jurisdiction over various direct spending to report changes to those programs. Discretionary spending is constrained by providing an allocation (known as a 302(a) after the Budget Act of 1974 section it comes from)  to the Appropriations committees, which sets a maximum amount of budget authority that the committee may report to the floor and provides points of order against consideration of bills which exceed the limit.

Got it? Good.  Now here’s where it gets interesting. What effect does the existence of the 302(a) allocation have on the House Appropriations Committee?

A huge impact. And lots to discuss.

First, what actually happens when the Appropriations Committee gets the 302(a) allocation from the approved budget resolution? Under law, they are required to divide it up among the subcommittees, into what is know as 302(b) allocations, which they then approve and forward to the floor. (Here’s an example). These 302(b) allocations are the maximum amounts which each subcommittee may report to the floor in their bills, and are enforced by points of order on the floor. If you step back for a second and give it some thought, you might arrive at a logical institutional conclusion: under the 302(a) and 302(b) system, individual subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee are not particularly capable of reducing spending, since they are set in competition for part of what is ultimately a fixed-size pie. And, indeed, that is what you often see with the subcommittees; absent an ability to constrain aggregate spending by reducing their own consumption, the subcommittees instead jockey and lobby for larger shares of the already-decided whole pie.

This arrangement has consequences big and small. From a macro point of view, the very existence of the 302(a) pushes the bulk of the labor to restrain spending off of the Appropriations Committee and onto the Budget Committee, both intellectually and functionally.  Prior to the existence of the 302(a) allocations, the Appropriations Committee was front in center if federal spending created huge deficits or was otherwise seen as too high. And consequently, the committee was regularly stocked by somewhat more fiscally conservative Representatives and led by fiscally conservative chairmen, who often saw their primary job as oversight, not appropriations.  Under the modern system, on the other hand, the Appropriations Committee cannot exceed the 302(a) allocation  both chambers of Congress have just approved. And thus the duty to constrain spending falls on the Budget Committee, rather than the Appropriations Committee.

As described above, at the micro-level this has serious consequences for how the subcommittees operate. Imagine you are a subcommittee clerk working with a subcommittee chair. Even if you care about restraining aggregate spending, you can’t really do that. You can certainly restrain your own subcommittees spending, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for restraining aggregate spending. For if you deliver a bill that comes in below your 302(b) allocation, the portion of your allocation that you didn’t use can simply be transferred for use on another bill coming out of another subcommittee. In fact, the Appropriations Committee is authorized to, and routinely does, reserve a portion of the 302(a) allocation to the full committee, which it can then use as needed if unforeseen budgetary situations arise between April and when the bills are finished later in the summer.

This points to another strategic dynamic: it’s not the worst thing in the world to be one of the last bills the committee reports out to the floor, because there’s often a bunch of money left over in the 302(a), either because the full committee’s reserve has not been used, or because spending was cut through amendments on the House floor. That’s right, when floor amendments cut spending, the equivalent spending isn’t taken out of the 302(a) allocation, and therefore it’s quite difficult to constrain aggregate federal spending by using floor amendments to cut an individual bill. Even worse, an amendment could be offered behind you to put the money back in to a different part of the bill.

Both of these concerns are somewhat mitigated by the “spending reduction accounts” created under rule in each bill at the beginning of the 112th Congress, which traps money cut by floor amendment in a functionally-fictitious account within the bill, theoretically blocking attempts to reinstate the money or to transfer it out of the bill. Even this, however, is far from airtight, since it doesn’t actually adjust the 302(a) allocation, and therefore doesn’t preclude use of reduction funds at a future stage, such as during consideration of a conference report. And in the House, the leadership can usually resort to a special rule to block points of order, if necessary, so long as they can get their caucus to support the rule.

In a very tight fiscal climate, of course, none of this really matters. When each appropriations subcommittee is facing the possibility of a net cut in funds relative to the previous fiscal year, there are very few Members or clerks seeking to further reduce funding beyond their 302(b) allocation. And consequently, it truly becomes a question of trying to get as large of a piece as possible from the divided pie. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the 302(b) allocation is the key piece of information that the subcommittee is waiting all Spring to receive. What are they doing in the meantime? Well, mostly working with the agencies under their jurisdiction to understand and conduct oversight of the agency budget requests and justifications, holding related hearings on those requests and justifications, and doing both formal and informal budget drills. But sometimes, eventually,  just waiting around for the number.

The budget drills — which are nothing more than producing proposed numbers for your bill and seeing how it adds up — are in some ways key. It’s common for the full committee front office to request that the subcommittees do formal drills at different allocation levels (say, flat, 1% increase over last year, 2%, and 3%), and report back their findings to the front office. Such exercise are both instructive practice and strategic opportunities for the subcommittees, who are of course jockey and lobbying for their 302(b) allocations. They allow the subcommittee staff to see how short they are against competing agency requests and therefore begin to plan priorities, but they also allow them to highlight to the front office how bad a low-end allocation might be for  items in their jurisdiction. And so the strategic incentives are often to report budget drill numbers that are the equivalent of agency threats to close the Washington Monument; it’s helpful to spot drill shortfalls in highly visible locations. Double helpful if you are in a zero-sum competitive environment and every other subcommittee has the same incentive.

Now, I’ve barely scratched the surface here. There’s a lot more that can be said. But my bottom line is that observes often overlook how the modern congressional budget process has affected the appropriations process. The reality is that it has fundamentally transformed it, both formally and in the practices and strategies employed by the subcommittee staff and chairs. Not necessarily for better or worse, but definitely for sure. And while there have been lots of changes to the practice of appropriations in the last few decades — most notably the larger role of the leadership in developing the subcommittee bills, the increased use of special rules to block floor amendments to the bills, the increased power of the full committee over the subcommittees, and the proliferation (but eventually shut off) of the earmarking within the bills — it’s my hunch that a lot of the changes are, at root, connected to the existence of the Budget Act and the constraints of the 302(a)-302(b) system.

So I walked over to the Supreme Court this morning, around 11:50am, after day 1 of oral argument ended in HHS vs. Florida, aka Is Obamacare Constitutional?

Every time I see or go near a public political protest, I’m reminded of something my dad — who was no stranger to a good Vietnam anti-war demonstration — used to always say: the only rational reason to go to a street protest is to meet girls. Period.

But, then again, he brought some of his liberal elitist’s narrow mindset to the term rational. Street protest certainly seems not only appropriate, but almost necessary for those shut out of the normal democratic process (i.e. African-Americans denied the right to vote; people under 21 who were being drafted pre-26th amendment; etc.). Not that any of that applies in this case. But as a libertarian, I’m willing to let a thousand flowers bloom; neither the means nor ends of others’ peaceful political activities need be rational in our own eyes. And the very practice of political activity, no matter how irrational or wacky, probably has some significant civil society benefits.

Anyway, here are some photos I took. I have a few thoughts — none addressing the constitutionality or soundness of Obamacare, you have ten thousand better source options than me for that today— below the pictures.

Here are three things I was thinking about as I walked down 1st Street NE:

1. The scene in front of the Court was not particularly memorable. Pretty weak showing by the demonstrators today. Maybe that was because no one cares about the Anti-Injunction Act and everyone is saving their big guns for tomorrow. Maybe it was because this is just another stop on a multi-year protesting circuit around this issue. It certainly wasn’t the weather: a windy but otherwise beautiful March day in Washington, with flowers in bloom and barely a cloud in the sky. By the time I got there, the grassroots protesters were easily outnumbered by the suits and media and, well, people like me, down there to take it all in and gawk. There was very little animosity; I saw a handful of cross-ideological chats going on. No slogans being shouted. Pretty serene, actually. Nothing compared to the major right-to-life protests, which are easily 100 or 500  times as large.

Now, this is not to say that I was disappointed. I think everyone should take a walk by the Supreme Court at least once in their life as a major case is being decided. It’s a very small-r republican feeling. And an instructive one too. The Court building itself is an iconic backdrop; you are directly across the street from the Capitol. The attorneys and interest groups hold dueling news conferences, like trial-lawyers from the movies. Reporters and photographers have massive setups, which serve to remind you that so much of this is staged, and so much of the television coverage scripted. And, most importantly, there’s a sense when you stand among the protesters that you are at the very interface of citizen and government in a republic. Also, markets in everything:  if you went there today, you got to see the people being paid to wait in line for entry into tomorrow’s oral arguments.

2. There’s no way around the fact that protesting at the Court is logically awkward. Despite what my father says, I understand the motivations of grassroots demonstrators and protest lobbyist. As I’ve written about before in the congressional context, they believe (probably correctly) that they are influencing policy in some way. But standing outside Capitol South Metro trying to influence staffers is quite different than standing outside the Court, because, well, the Court simply isn’t beholden to public opinion the way legislators are. Now, that’s not to say the Court isn’t influenced by public opinion, just that it’s exceedingly unlikely Anthony Kennedy is looking out his chambers’ window and being shaped by protesters standing on the plaza. If anyone in the government is insulated from public pressure, it’s the Court.

But I think everyone kind of knows this. Even the protesters. And that’s why it’s so odd to go to a protest at the Court plaza: no one there is really trying to influence the Court, at least not directly. The whole game, as with most protests, is to try to influence the national media, who can then file stories that influence public opinion or legislative opinion, or both. Every time I go to a protest at the Court, I always think the protesters are facing the wrong direction: standing there on 1st street, they all have their eyes up on the columns of the courthouse (odd to call it that, isn’t it?), and their backs facing the United States Senate. But try to explain to some intelligent alien what is going on, and his eventual question would almost have to be: why aren’t they standing on the steps of the Senate, or at least looking that direction?

Now, people will claim this is the case with street protests over congressional policy. That the whole point is to influence the media, either to distort public opinion as it is seen by legislators or to change actual public opinion on an issue. That’s true in many cases, but it’s not always true in Washington. The protests and demonstrations at Capitol South metro are there specifically to try to directly influence Congress, without the media middle man. Which sort of reinforces the underlying point: protests at the Court are inherently media events; there’s no other reason to be standing in that particular spot. You aren’t trying for direct influence, and you don’t need to be in Washington. So it strikes me as mostly a coordination game among the protesters or, perhaps more likely, a convenience factor for the press, since they have to be there anyway. I’m not saying it’s not the logical place to conduct the protest. It is.

But even a cursory logical inquiry into it makes you realize the protests are more about the 2012 election that about the court case at hand.

3. The Court protests can’t take advantage of the space. The Supreme Court plaza is really one of the great physical structures for holding a protest. Just a massive flat area at the base of the steps to the Court, all raised up about 10 steps from the street. It’s almost as if they built it with protests in mind. Of course, you can’t really hold your protests on the plaza, because 40 U.S.C. 6135 allows the Court police to keep people off of the plaza. Consequently, all of the protest really takes place on the sidewalk in front of the plaza on 1st Street NE, and the no-man’s land between the 1st street sidewalk and the steps up to the plaza.   Functionally, this is understandable. But it really takes what could be an awesome venue and reduces it to squarely mediocre.

We’re closing on our new house tomorrow and then moving in on Friday. So blogging for the rest of the week may be lighter. Or heavier. We’ll see.

Every Twelve Seconds.

That’s the title of the horrifying — but also absolutely wonderful — new political science book by Tim Pachirat.

I went to graduate school with Tim, and I can vividly remember the first time he told me about his dissertation plans.  We were standing on Prospect St. in New Haven, next to the bike rack outside of Brewster Hall, killing time in the way that graduate students are so good at on sunny days. I was babbling on about an idea I had to write some ridiculous thesis about anti-party thought in 19th century America. When I finally came up for air, I turned the question to Tim. What grand plans did he have in mind? I will never forget his response:

“I’m going to go work in a slaughterhouse in Nebraska.”

I didn’t even know how to respond. This was a crazy idea. Double crazy for someone allegedly interested in political theory. Triple crazy for a vegetarian allegedly interested in political theory. And quadruple crazy for a vegetarian allegedly interested in political theory who was living in the married student housing ghetto at Yale with a wife and young children.

But sane enough to eventually become one of the best books I’ve read in years. Not best dissertations. Not best academic books. Just best books. Period.

Every Twelve Seconds is about industrial slaughterhouses and what Tim calls the “politics of sight.” The title refers to how often a cow is slaughtered in the factory Tim worked, about 2500 over the course of a day. As he reminds us in the introduction, however, it is not a book about animal rights. It is about violence and society. In Tim’s words, it provides “a firsthand, contemporary account of industrialized slaughter, and does so to provoke reflection on how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in modern society.” But I think that sells the book short. It’s part The Jungle. It’s part Fast Food Nation. It’s part Dominion. It’s part a how-to guide for ethnographic research. And it’s part a golden roadmap for how to write relevant and engaging contemporary political theory.

But mostly, it’s a brilliant narrative that recounts not only the industrial process of turning cattle into packaged meat and the political and social structures of the world in which that occurs, but also what it feels like to be a human cog within that world. A world where men must necessarily come face-to-face with endless violence, at all times. And how, in response, that world must be designed. And so while the language of the slaughterhouse requires the cattle to be only known as “beef” during the endless march up the chute to the knocking gun and the killing floor, the men who perform these tasks — mostly poor, most unskilled, mostly immigrants, all working at-will for meager wages and in constant fear of being fired — must also come to be seen as just raw materials by their supervisors, with job titles like Tongue Trimmer or Tail Harvester or Spinal Cord Remover.

The narrative leaves nothing to the imagination, either technical or emotional. From the 19th-century-like imagery of standing around the factory gates in hopes of being selected for a job to the visceral experience of spending a 10-hour day doing nothing but ripping still-warm cow livers off of conveyor-belted hooks to the numbing bureaucratic cops-and-robbers game that the quality-control team plays against the USDA-inspectors on a minute-by-minute basis over clean knives and hand-washing and the trimming of feces off meat in the cooler, you don’t just read about the world of slaughter, but you actually experience it. And that includes the evolution of your own thought: as with the author, you are initially horrified by the sights, sounds, and smells of the slaughterhouse when confronted with the reality that is hidden in plain sight at the grocery store. This is where our steaks come from? But through the course of the book, the reader develops much of the desensitization that the slaughterhouse worker uses as a coping mechanism. Your revulsion toward the killing floor eerily dissipates as you move through the book.

Outside of the narrative, two analytical highlights of the book stand out. The first is the maps of the slaughterhouse, and the woven-in micro-description of the geographic slaughter process. So well protected are slaughterhouses by walls and state regulations, that it is difficult to get good information on even how they are actually organized. Tim recreates visual floorplans of the entire factory, with detailed information on where each worker stands, every USDA inspector patrols, and the jobs that occur second-by-second as the beef moves through the slaughterhouse. This brings to life various aspects of the narrative: for instance, the sheer duality of the operation, which is simultaneously a well-thought out and masterfully-executed engineering marvel of  assembly-line efficiency, while also a disgustingly and surprisingly medieval operation: there is blood everywhere, the temperature is absurdly hot on the kill side and absurdly cold on in the cooler, the weapon of choice is the knife, and workers joke around by throwing animal fat at each other.

The second highlight of the book is the chapter on the bureaucratic oversight of the USDA. Much to my surprise, it turns out that a slaughterhouse has numerous USDA officials working full-time to monitor the production. One might think that this results in a high quality of meat (which it undoubtedly does relative to, say, 19th century industrialized slaughter), but the implication of Tim’s experience is that regulatory structure has become so routinized as to cease to be external to the process; instead, the regulations — or, more precisely, the skirting of the regulations — are the process. And so a cat-and-mouse game ensues between the quality control team of the factory and the full-time USDA inspectors, with the incentives offered to each of them veering so far from their underlying goals (profit and safe meat, respectively) that they appear to exist in an alternative world, where their jobs cease to reflect food production but strangely appear to symbiotically rely on each other’s existence. Not exactly a sideshow to the operation, but not not a sideshow, either.

There are those who may shy away from this book because it engages political theory. That would be a mistake. I hate contemporary political theory. I could no more finish a book by Foucault than I could write one. But this book neither drifts into that world nor relies on it, and the occasional forays that direction are not only tolerable but (surprisingly) very enjoyable. It all comes back to the human narrative, and the meticulous technical and emotional detail brought to it. You will never read a political science dissertation quite like this, because I don’t think one has ever been written. As Tim writes in his introduction, “the detailed accounts that follow are not merely incidental to or illustrative of a more theoretical argument about how distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in contemporary society. They are the argument.”

And a masterful argument at that. You will probably attempt to blind yourself to this book. It is much easier not to read it. But that, in itself, is kind of the point. As a meat consumer, it is debatable as to whether you are responsible for what goes on in the slaughterhouse, in reference to the animals or to the humans. And it is also debatable whether or not what goes on there is morally sound in a civilized liberal democracy. But anytime you seek to shield yourself from information because the very knowing of the facts might make you uncomfortable, well, that’s a strong sign that you are afraid of what your moral sense might find.

I’m somewhat hesitant to write about the ACA (aka: the health care law, Obamacare, etc.), because: (1) it’s not something I know a whole lot about at the political level; (2) it’s something I know absolutely nothing about at the policy-details level; (3) it’s not a policy I feel very strongly about one way or another; (4) discussions of it very quickly drift into partisan and ideological fights; and (5) there’s a serious possibility of not saying anything new and/or interesting. So not an exacta, not a trifecta, not even a superfecta, but the rare quint-fecta of dangerous commentary waters!

This could get ugly. But let’s get it on.

I’m much more interested in the constitutionality of the ACA than I am in the actual policy. And not because I care all that much about the constitutionality of the ACA per se;  what I’m interested in is the effect that it will have on the future of congressional/federal power, as well as how it will fit into our understanding of the post-Lopez walkback from the psuedo-plenary commerce clause power of Congress that was more or less presumed at a practical level by the late 20th century.

Via a post by Jonathan Cohn this morning, comes Richard Primus’s theory that the Lopez decision will give the Supreme Court the room to declare the individual mandate constitutional:

As part of their socialization into the world of American constitutional law, lawyers learn the maxim that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers … [c]onstitutional law has tolerated tremendous expansions of federal power in practice, as the logic of modern life has directed. But it has proved easier to tolerate those expansions while continuing to pay homage to the maxim than to repudiate the maxim openly. A piece of our identity is invested in the maxim: articulating it reminds us of a part of who we are, or of a story in which we locate ourselves … Lopez was decided as it was partly because a majority of the Court felt that it could not uphold the Gun-Free School Zones Act and still utter the maxim. At oral argument in the case, the Solicitor General of the United States was asked to identify a law that the federal government could not make if the statute at issue were upheld. He could not provide an example.

…

That said, the maxim does not demand that the Supreme Court constantly strike down federal laws. It demands only evidence that it is taken seriously. Lopez and Morrison insulate the Court against charges of heresy on the point-not perfectly, but considerably more than would be the case had those decisions not been rendered. In later cases, the Court can uphold far-reaching exercises of the commerce power without laying itself as open to the claim that it has let the maxim come to nothing. When it upholds other federal statutes, the Court can identify concrete examples of laws that are beyond the commerce power, laws with respect to which it has exercised its solemn duty to police the boundaries of federal legislative power.So when it upholds other laws as within the commerce power, it can adduce evidence that it has not left the maxim empty.

This, to me, is a very-well stated description of what is actually on trial next week, and I think it is the crux of the issue with the ACA. It is fundamentally not a question of whether the individual mandate itself can be defended as Constitutional. Oh, there’s lots of debate on that, for sure. But the real issue has always been the one raised by Primus: if the commerce clause allows Congress to legislative the individual mandate, is there a hypothetical congressional Act that we can imagine that would not be constitutional? If there is not such a hypothetical law, must we then either accept that Congress does indeed possess plenary power and that the widely-held maxim of limited and enumerated powers is indeed dead and gone, or, if do not, then must we unwind the logic and accept that the individual mandate is not constitutional.

This is worth pondering, because from my point of view, at the heart of the debate over the individual mandate are two competing views of the Constitution, both of which can plausibly claim the mantle of “common sense.” The first point of view is the historical one: the text of the Constitution plainly limits the power of the federal government, and to read the document and decide otherwise is more or less absurd. To reject this premise out of hand is to willfully blind one’s self to even the most cursory analysis of the document. The competing point of view, of course, is the developmental one: over the course of 200+ years, the give and take of politics and court jurisprudence has unintentionally handed us what is more or less a common-law Constitution under which it is plainly recognized that the federal legislature is restrained only by specific textually prohibitions, and the will of the voters. Any other reading is absurd.

Now, the crazy part is not that these two competing views exist; the crazy part is that many people — including me — are instinctively drawn to both of them. This comes back to the common sense test. I’m not a huge fan of the ACA (based on what I know of it, which, again, is pretty chattering-class pedestrian), but I don’t find it the least bit unreasonable that the federal government would be allowed to regulate it. On the other hand, I don’t think the “broccoli test” — lampooned by many liberals as an absurd hypothetical — can be dismissed in one short stroke; I do not believe in a national legislature that has the ability to regulate all aspects of my private life down to what cereal I eat, held in check only by the will of the transient (super)majority. And I think that’s common sense, too.

And look, I’m not saying common sense is everything when it comes to SCOTUS decisions. But I think it matters. It matters to the justices — as the famous question asked of the government in Lopez indicates — and more importantly, I think it matters to the popular legitimacy of an upheld law. While the Court has never shied away from a decision simply because they went against common sense, many of the most popularly-detested decisions were hated precisely because they went against common sense. Dred being at the top of the list; it was just not a plausible understanding of America to implicitly or explicitly assert that the natural condition of all the territory in the United States was slavery, up until a state specifically prohibited it. Seventy years of common sense has said the opposite was true.

And so, to me, the chief job of the government next week at oral argument is going to be to find a way to square these two realms of common sense, that Congress can impose and enforce individual mandates on citizens to participate in private economic activity, but that there still exists a limitation on congressional power such that laws may be articulated that Congress cannot legally enact. To say that Congress never would enact such laws is not good enough. As with Lopez, I think the Court will not look fondly upon a government that meekly concedes no limitation on Congress. The alternative option, of course, is to proudly defend the plenary power of the national legislature under the commerce caluse. High risk, and incredibly unlikely. For no matter how much that has become the normative view of mainstream progressive thought, it woefully ignores the positive implications for the current Court.

Now, Primus and Cohn present a clever idea that threads the needle here and satisfies the common sense concerns. When Justice Scalia asks the government to identify a law that the federal government could not make if the individual mandate were upheld, the government will simply respond, “Lopez.” That is, even under the theory that the individual mandate is constitutional, the original 1990 Gun Free School Act would still be unconstitutional. And voila!, problem solved: we can uphold the individual mandate and continue to live in a world where the powers are Congress are, at some level, still not plenary. Not only will this be true at a factual level — Lopez, and the congressional limtis therein, will still be the law of the land — but more importantly, at a cognitive level. So long as the solicitor general can easily point out, and the Justices and the chattering class can easily take in, that there are still places Congress cannot go, we can all continue to sleep on the idea of an enumerated, limited federal government.

This is an interesting and important argument. But I’m not sure that it holds. It rests on the assumption that the Lopez decision will not be implicitly overruled by an upholding of the individual mandate. That’s certainly possible: the distinction at hand — and that was further articulated in Raich v. Gonzalez  — is that the Gun Free Schools Act simply had no connection to interstate commerce. Trying to link gun possession at schools to hypothetical increases in violence and then to hypothetical increases in insurance rates and thus the economy — as was one of the government’s principle arguments — was just a bridge too far. Fair enough. But read that last sentence again: in Lopez, the government specifically linked  gun possession to insurance costs. I don’t know if that sends chills down your spine, but it sure as hell should get you sitting up in your seat.

Because the very argument made in favor of the mandate now is that Congress has the power to regulate the health insurance market, and the individual mandate is legitimate simply as a  “necessary and proper” non-commerce means to an end that can plainly be regulated under the commerce clause. It’s a clean, straightforward argument. It’s the one Primus makes, and I think it’s the winning argument for the first half of the challenge facing the government. But it’s also potentially the fatal flaw in regard to the common sense problem. To wit: if the individual mandate is necessary and proper to the regulation of the health insurance market, what then stands in they way of the government barring possession of guns at schools as a means to regulate that same insurance market? Because while the Gun Free Schools Act didn’t pass the commerce clause test on its own, as a non-commerical component of a broad scheme regulating health insurance, it seems to fall directly into a Raich-esque sphere of legitimacy. At least plausibly.

In effect, it does not strike me as at all unrealistic to think that the upholding of the individual mandate is logically the death knell of Lopez. That is, if we are to accept the individual mandate, we are probably going to have to accept the dissenting view in Lopez, or something quite similar to it.  And if Lopez comes crumbling down, all of a sudden the solicitor general may once again be standing in front of the Court, trying but failing to articulate a limit on congressional power. Of course, I’m no lawyer, much less any sort of commerce clause legal expert. And sure, it’s a bit gimmicky to note that the government’s defense in Lopez articulated an insurance theory as the connection between gun possession and the economy. But that doesn’t make it any less real.

There are excellent policy arguments in favor of Congress regulating and providing for health insurance. And, as I have stated, it’s almost common sense that Congress should have the power to regulate and provide for health insurance more or less as they see fit. But as of yet, I have not seen an answer to the key meta-question at hand, which is “If we uphold this statute, what can Congress not do?” My guess is that a convincing response will be forthcoming if the law is upheld, since I can only assume that the Justices will not be able to uphold the law without articulating one. But I have not heard it  yet. And I do not think that Lopez gets you there.

Last week, in response to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s suggestion that we increase Members’ staff and office budgets, I wrote a primer on how the Member’s Representational Allowance works in the House. Today, my goal is to offer the companion primer, on how committee funding works in the House. I’ll do it Q&A style, since it’s a bit complicated. (As with the MRA, I will focus on the House; the Senate process is slightly different, but operates on the same principles.) For background, you might want to start with my  post on the basic staffing structure in the legislative branch if you are totally unfamiliar with the terrain.

Q. How do House committees get money to pay for staff?

A. More or less the same way as Members do in their personal office: appropriations made under law in the Legislative Branch Appropriations, paired with authorizations that provide spending limits.

Q. So the Committee on House Administration Committee sets the spending limits?

A. Not exactly. They have jurisdiction over the policy area, but under Rule X, clause 6 of the Rules of the House of Representatives, the House Administration Committee reports a “primary expense resolution” to the floor that authorizes the expenses for each standing and select committee in the House (except for Appropriations). The resolution is then passed (or not) by the chamber on the floor. For instance, in the 112th Congress, the House Administration Committee report H.Res.147 to the floor, which was agreed to on March 17, 2011. Under Rule X, they are also required to submit a committee report (in this case, H.Rpt. 112-130) detailing the total funding and other information.

Q. Why doesn’t the Appropriations Committee get an authorization?

A. Under the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act, the House Appropriations Committee is authorized to appropriate its own funds, separate from the funds for the other standing committees. So while the rest of the standing committees draw their funding from a single Treasury account (and therefore need individual limits on how much they can draw), the appropriations committee has its own Treasury account. From a practical politics point of view, it’s a reminder of the power of the Appropriations Committee; they need not submit to a funding process that puts their own funding in someone else’s control.

Q. Wait, the individual committees don’t have their own Treasury accounts?

A. Nope. And this is one of the most common misconceptions about how funding works in the Legislative Branch. Just as individual Members do not have separate Treasury account for their MRAs, neither do the standings committees. Instead, the appropriation for House committees is in two pieces in the Legislative Branch Act — one lump of money for all the committees except Appropriations, and a separate account for Appropriations. This is part of the reason that the House Administration Committee needs to report, and the House needs to agree to, authorized limits each committee; everyone is pulling their money out of the same general account.

Q. How much is appropriated?

A. In FY2012, just under $126 million for all the committees except for Appropriations, and $26.6 million for the Appropriations Committee.

Q. Wait, the appropriation is for a fiscal year? I thought you said the authorization was agreed to in March?

A. It was. There are two totally different timelines here. The funding for  the committees is appropriated — as like most federal appropriations — annually on the October 1 – September 30 calendar. The authorizations, however, are for calendar years (actually session-years, January 3 to January 2).

Q. I don’t get it?

A. Don’t worry, it’s confusing. Think of it this way: there’s a big garbage full of money. Every year we have to refill it with more money, because on October 1st, we can no longer use the money that’s in there. So we agree on how much to refill it with on October 1. Meanwhile, we want to let 20 different people take money out of the bag when they need it. So we set a limit for how much each of them can take out in any given year. That the limit we put on them runs on a different calendar than the the scheduled refilling of the bag doesn’t actually matter, so long as we keep refilling the bag and makes sure the limits we set for the 20 people don’t exceed the amount in the bag. That those people end up taking out money from two different fiscal years on one limit doesn’t make a difference. It’s the same bag.

Q. Why don’t we just authorize limits for fiscal years?

A. Because then the 2nd year’s authorizations in any Congress would run through the following Congress’s first session. And that’s not efficient because if there’s a change in power, there might be a desire for a substantial change in the allocation of funding across committees. It makes the most sense to authorize committee funds for each session, because that way, you know the priorities of the majority and they are (relatively) stable.

Q. But you said they do this in March?

A. Yup. The trade-off for having the authorizations not run across two different Congresses is that you can’t get the authorizations done for the first session prior to that session getting underway. It takes some time for the committees to develop their budgets, for the House Administration Committee to sort out how much money it has and where it should go, and for the primary expense resolution to be agreed to on the House floor.

Q. So how do committees pay for anything between January 3 and March?

A.Remember, it’s not an issue of the money not being appropriated. That runs on a fiscal year basis, so the bag is full of useable funds. The issue is that there’s no authorization at the outset of a Congress. So House Rules X, clause 7 provides for interim funding authorizations: the committees can spend up to 9 percent of their total 2-year authorization from the previous Congress. Any spending is then charged against their eventual 1st session authorization after the primary expense resolution is agreed to.

Q. Today is March 19. I follow congressional news. Why am I not hearing about this right now?

A. Because the contemporary process is for the primary expense resolution to be biennial, meaning that in March of the 1st session of a Congress, committee funding authorizations are provided for both the 1st and 2nd session of the Congress. Each committee is given a total authorization, as well as sub-authorizations for each session.

Q. Do they ever adjust the numbers later on within a Congress?

A. Sure. They did this year. H.Res. 496 reduced 2nd session funding for all standing committees (aside from House Appropriations).

Q. What’s the formula for determining how much each committee gets?

A. Unlike the MRA, there’s no neutral formula for determining committee funding. Instead, each committee develops its own budget request, which it submits to House Administration. Often, these requests are formalized into legislative resolution that are introduced in the House (see, for example, H.Res.107, which is the funding request for the Education Committee in the 112th Congress). House Administration then holds hearings prior to developing the primary expense resolution. Typically at these hearing, the chair and ranking member of each committee testify as to their budget request.

Q. Wait, Members of Congress testify at the hearing of another committee?

A. Yup. It’s one of the few places where that happens routinely (the other is, of course, at the Rules Committee when Members must testify on behalf of amendments they would like included in a special rule).

Q. What determines how much each committee gets?

A. At one level, it’s just politics. There’s a certain amount of money, each committee tries to justify how much they need within the context of how much is available via the appropriation. Lots of things come into play: the priorities of the House Administration Committee, the priorities of the majority leadership, the priorities of the majority caucus, the priorities of the chamber, the input of the appropriators, and so forth. There’s a certain level of professionalization to it as well — it would be very unusual to see, say, half the committees get a 20% increase over last year and half of them get a 20% decrease. The point being that’s there’s a certain amount of distributional comity. Nevertheless, the priorities of the majority party certainly matter. If some committees are clearly going to be busy, they will usually see more funding.

Q. What do committees spend the money on?

A. Mostly staff. As with the MRA, the funding for committees pays for more or less all expenses: staff, consulting services, office expenses, and travel. Unlike Members, or course, the committees do not have district offices and typically do not send very much franked mail.

Q. Who decides on how to spend committee funds?

A. Technically, the chairman has total control over the budget. Under the House Rules, committee funds are spent on vouchers signed by the chairman.

Q. Does the minority get any funds?

A. Yes. Well, sort of. There is a long-standing debate in the House over how the staff and resource funding should be divided for the committees. Currently, the Committee on House Administration promotes the idea that the minority should get 1/3 of the funding, and they look fondly upon committees that present that as their arrangement in the funding hearings. There is relatively widespread consensus that this should be the policy for staff funding, and it is something of a weak norm. (It should be noted, however, that the Chairmen still control and are still responsible for the entire budget). So most committees follow that norm. There are, however, occasional squabbles over whether non-staff resources should also be divided 2/3 and 1/3. Many, if not most, committees now follow the 2/3 and 1/3 distribution for all committee funds.

Q. So how many staffers work for the committees?

A. About 1500 right now. That’s down from from a high of about 2200 in the early 90′s. Below is a chart of House leadership and House Committee staffing levels, from 1982 to 2010, scaled on separate axes. The dotted line is committee staff. Note the large drop in 1995, when committee staff was cut across the board by 1/3. During this time period, committee staff decreased roughly 18%. Over the same period, Member personal staff increased by 6%, and core leadership staff increased by 233%.

Q. What do the staffers do?

A. Well, whatever the committee wants them to do. Mostly that falls into the nebulous world of policy analysis, policy creation, and policy oversight: evaluating existing laws and bills to change them, developing original legislation to change law, and conducting oversight of existing policy, usually in response to the priorities of the full committee and sub-committee chairmen.

Q. Yeah, but what do the staffers actually do?

A. Mostly four things. First, listening and negotiating with the stakeholders and policymakers who are seeking to alter current law. This can be everything from the chairman (often) to other Members (both on the committee and off), to stakeholders both inside and outside the government, public and private. Second, preparing legislative proposals in response to the concerns of these stakeholders, by actually drafting potential language. Third, preparing hearings and committee markups on the legislation, which runs the complete range from choosing witnesses and preparing questions, all the way down to physically assembling briefing books for the Members. Fourth, conducting oversight of existing policy, which can range from phone calls to stakeholders to oversight hearings of executive branch officials.

Q. Are committee staff paid similarly to Member offices staff?

A. Broadly speaking, yes. Committees have staff assistants who make very little money and they have senior professional staffers who often make the maximum committee staff salary under the Speaker’s Pay Order, which outlines several tiers of maximum pay for various number of individuals, all tiers being in the $160-170k range. It’s hard to generalize, but the committee system tends to have, on average, better paid staff, typically because they come to the job with more experience or education, and tend to stay in the job longer, in comparison to Member office staff.

Q. Do we need more committee staffers?

A. Completely depends on who you ask. And ultimately, like the MRA, it depends on your axiomatic values. There are really three concerns. First, are more or less committee staffers optimal on an absolute level? That is, would a different number of committee staff help offset the reliance of Members on information sources like lobbyists. Second, are more or less committee staffers optimal on a relative level, either in reference to the executive branch or in reference to other legislative branch entities, such as the leadership or the Member personal offices. Like lobbyists, both the President and the leadership can use their vast resources to produce and disseminate information as a political weapon. Whether you believe a better balance needs to exist will largely inform your opinion about committee staffing.

Of course, staffing also needs to be properly matched to authority. If you don’t believe in a strong committee system — that is, if you would prefer a greater centralization of policy-making power in the House — then it hardly would make sense to want to increase committee staff. And vice-versa. There’s some evidence that the committee system simply isn’t being used for the same purposes as it was a generation ago; the overall number of hearings and markups is down, and a higher percentage of major policy seems to be coming directly from the leaderhsip. That’s neither inherently good or bad, but it does, again, inform the question of committee staff. There’s not a lot of reason to beef up a congressional sub-institution with resources, if it’s formal and informal authority is purposefully being waned.\

Q. Aside from the separate funding stream, is the Appropriations Committee different?

A. Very much so. One really important difference is that there’s no flurry of bills coming at the Appropriations Committee, and very few surprises in their agenda. On a typical committee, you never really know what is coming next; not only do current events play a role in the agenda, but the legislative priorities of various Members and the leadership also dictate things. On Appropriations, each subcommittee more or less has one bill that they deal with every year, and they more or less know what is in it and what the calendar looks like for consideration of it. Yes, there are supplementals and other non-routine items, but the basic budget calendar (budget justification hearings starting in late winter; bill and report production in the Spring; markup in the late Spring; floor consideration in the summer; and oversight year-round) makes for a rhythm that is more regular than other committees.

Previous “Q&A” style posts

March 16, 2012 — Increase the MRA in the House?

March 5, 2012 — Democratic Appropriations Subcommittee Assignment in the House.

March 2, 2012 — Filling the tree in the Senate.

December 15, 2011 — Rule Layover Waivers in the House.

December 5, 2011 — How a bill becomes a law. Literally.

November 29, 2011 — The other caucuses. The ones in Congress.

Under many plausible scenarios for American politics circa 2013, the sequestration provided for in the Budget Control Act will not come to pass, nor will the required cuts. That’s just sort of how things work, and you can kinda see it coming  in the way people are talking. For example, this.

BREAKING: It’s really hard to pass and  implement policies with long-term benefits but short-term costs.

I’m not a fan of people who talk about how America’s fiscal problems are a “failure of the political class.”  You hear this all the time among the pundit class, David Brooks writes some variation of it every other week in the back of the New York Times, and half of the Washington journalistic corp not only buys into the idea, but all of them seem to think they invented the concept because they were the last ones to write about it. It’s complete nonsense. Whatever shortcomings you might ascribe to American democracy, that the Members of Congress are ignoring a massive pubic outcry is not one of them. As if somehow the problem is that all the people want nice balanced budgets and a reduced public debt, it’s just that the politicians won’t deliver it to them. Please.

The real problem is that fiscal policy in an indebted democracy resides on a J-Cuvre. Which is nothing more than to say that the only way to achieve long-term positive results is to incur short-term negative pain. Thus the “J” in the curve. It’s just another way of explaining one of the fundamental problems democratic systems face: they are not good at long-term planning. But it’s particularly problematic when the long-term planning requires short-term pain. In many ways, the J-Cuvre is just a longitudinal collective action problem (long-term good vs. short-term good), as opposed to the cross-sectional version (common good vs. individual good)  that one might be more familiar with. It’s not crazy to say that these two problems are the heart of the institutional dilemma for any democracy.

The classic example is moving the former Soviet bloc economies in eastern Europe to capitalism. There was no doubt that capitalistic economics would produce much better long-term growth, but the only way to get there was to set the markets free, which caused all shorts of short-term pain at the bottom of the curve. Which led many voters to reject the ruling parties and reverse the liberalization. That’s a problem. In Washington (and other stable democracies) it translates to the classic political axiom: don’t produce policies that have short-term costs and long-term benefits. In fact, tend to do the opposite. So there you go.

But back to America’s political class. You constantly hear people bemoan the state of affairs that “no one in Washington will talk about raising taxes” or “no one in Washington will talk about cutting entitlements.” This is partly true, but it’s not for the reason people think, some “failure” of the political class. It is because to talk about those things, in many cases, is to not find yourself in Washington the following Congress. It’s basic natural selection. And it’s roots are with the voters, not the politicians. No one calls tax cuts without spending cuts a “failure of the political class,” and no one calls new unfunded entitlements a “failure of the political class.” More often we celebrate those things. But somehow their sum becomes a failure of the political class. In reality,  it’s all just the political class reflecting the (short-term) interests of their constituencies.

The trick, of course, in any J-curve situation is to find a way to get past the bottom of the curve without the democratic electorate either (a) punishing the long-term looking politicians and/or (b) electing new politicians to reverse the policies and/or (c) both. You need to both convince the existing political class that they will not be punished, and then have it actually turn out that they are not punished.  This, as you might surmise, is why autocratic states do not face significant J-curve problems the way democracies do; when there is no mechanism for reversing short-term public pain, it’s quite simple to ride out the curve until you get to the high side. You just do it.

In democracies, its’s a lot trickier. Some clever mechanism have been produced in the past: establishment of things like the federal reserve to set interest rates in an environment insulated from popular election and public sentiment; placing implementation of decisions in the hands of elected officials with longer time-horizions (like the President) or no time horizon (think Supreme Court settlement of the territorial question in the 1850′s or the segregation question in the 1950′s). But for most economic issues, Congress just has to deal with it. And it’s very, very hard to deal with an economic J-Curve when you have a 2-year term.

And this often leads to attempts by Congress to bind itself to a long-term policy, or more precisely, to bind a future Congress to a current policy. Everyone knows that’s really tough, and we all have a basic answer for why: a future Congress will just undo it. But that answer sort of begs the question. Why is it tough? And that’s  what really interests me: the micro-level reasons that this is so difficult for a legislature. I see five dimensions to this:

1. Legislatures can only make one type of law. This consistently bedevils legislators and staffers who would like to constrain future statutory action via … statute! But it simply can’t be done; any law that attempt to constrain what a future law can do is immediately rendered moot by any future law. You can constrain a lot of governmental actions with federal law, just not future federal laws. A classic example of this is the Commemorative Works Act, which requires that memorials in certain parts of DC be authorized by law (fine; that prevents non-statutes from authorizing the memorials), but then goes on to circumscribe what Congress can or cannot authorize in those laws. Useless!

For example, the law says, “A commemorative work solely commemorating a limited military engagement or a unit of an armed force may not be authorized.” But Congress can, and does, simply bypass such requirements by authorizing whatever the heck they want when they decide to authorize a new memorial. And lest you think this is only a problem for trivial issues, remember that it caught the Founders flat-footed; after they left the Northwest Ordinance out of the Constitution, they were forced to pass it as federal law in the first Congress. Subsequently, Congress routinely ignored it when organizing, dividing, and admitting new territories as states in the union. There are no “super-laws.” Next time you find yourself suggesting one — this will happen to you sooner than you think — remember that they are worthless. Period.

2. If statutory binds don’t work, you have resort to either macro or micro restraints. Given that you can’t use federal law to structure constraints on future federal laws, what can you do? Well, there are basically two options: bind from the top or bind from the bottom. Either constitutional amendment or procedural barricade in the chambers, particularly the Senate. Both of these solutions are plausibly great. A constitutional amendment adjusting the powers of Congress as a legislature will certainly accomplish your goal. And a procedural blockade in the House or Senate that prevents certain types of federal laws from getting out of the chamber is theoretically equally effective. Unfortunately, both strategies have drawbacks.

3. The macro-restraint of a Constitutional amendment just isn’t practical. It’s not for lack of trying that the Constitutional amendment route doesn’t work. Despite being the most popular proposed constitutional amendment of the last few decades, the Balanced Budget Amendment stills seems to be on the express train to nowhere-ville. Even if you set aside the many substantive concerns people have about the BBA, the process itself of producing a BBA is just a nightmare. Congress can’t do it on its own. The portion Congress can do takes a massive supermajority. And it just takes a long time even when you are successful. The latter issue is a massive problem for the BBA: supports grows for it periodically when there is a recession or an explosion of spending, but that immediate cause ceases to be a factor long before the BBA can get off the ground. And then interest has been lost. And the BBA just doesn’t seem like the type of amendment that could be passed in 100 days, 26th-amendment style.

4. And the micro restraints of procedural hurdles are often too far in the weeds. In theory, procedural restrains on the production of laws is a great solution. In the Senate, it’s (relatively) easy. You amend the rules (either the traditional way or via statutory rulemaking) creating a point of order on the floor against any legislation that you want to proscribe. Then individual Senators can block potential laws even if they have supermajority popular support in the chamber. This is more or less how non-statutory PAYGO is enforced in the Senate. In the House it’s a bit tougher, because the majority can write special rules that circumvent your point of order, but in theory you could at least make it a procedural pain in the ass to get around such a point of order (by specifying that the Rules Committee doesn’t have the power to introduce a privileged resolution that kills the point of order, the same way that the motion to recommit is protected), and it could be held together by a norm.

The problem with all of these types of procedural blockades is twofold: first, they are low on the public visibility/understanding scale. If future Members of Congress seek to reverse them, it’s so far in the weeds that it may not raise the public ire enough to dissuade such reversals. But more importantly, procedural points of order are passive restraints on congressional action; they only are enforced if someone demands they be enforced. So just as a quorum is assumed to be in the chamber unless someone suggests it is not, regardless of whether there are only a handful of Members present, so too with points of order. And that has a huge consequences: Members can bypass the points of order without a trace of evidence. There’s no record of something not being enforced on the House or Senate floor; you are looking for an absence of evidence. So not only is it not public that the point of order has been effectively rendered moot, but no individual Member is on the hook for not enforcing it.

5. Consequently, the “best” solution requires reducing legislative power. And so the most common way to bind legislative action is to remove the power altogether, and hand it to the executive branch. This is easy: write a positive law authorizing someone else to take control of a policy, preferably someone more insulated from democratic electoral politics, like the President, or an agency head, or the federal reserve. But this strategy comes with two problems. First, Members don’t love giving up power to the executive branch. And, more importantly, when Members do give up power to the executive branch, that’s an inherent loss of power for the legislature. But you already know how  I feel about that.

Pivoting off Ezra Klein’s review of two new books about lobbying and Congress, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry suggests that the way to combat the legislature subsidy of lobbying is to pay congressional staff higher salaries:

What if every member of Congress had a, say, $20 million staff-and-research budget? What if a congressional chief of staff made $1 million per year, and what if each congressman had an army of staffers to research policy and draft bills, as opposed to a skeleton staff? The legislative subsidy would just become irrelevant. Or at least, congresspeople would be on equal footing vis-à-vis well-funded lobbyists. And the cost would be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal budget — and even less compared to the social and economic cost of carveouts and tax breaks.

This raises two immediate questions:

• What is the current staff-and-research budget of each Member of Congress? Is it anywhere near $20 million per Member? How is it determined?

• Why doesn’t Congress simply implement Gobry’s solution? It’s not like anti-lobbyist legislation is unpopular. So what’s holding this sort of reform back?

I’ve written a bit before about the basic staffing structure in the legislative branch, so check that out if you need the lay of the land. Here I’m going to answer the two questions above. I’ll do it Q&A style, since it’s a bit complicated. I will focus on the House; the Senate is slightly different, but operates on the same principles.

Q. How do Representatives get the money to pay for staff?

A. Under law, the Member’s Representational Allowance (MRA) — a lump-sum of money that Members can spend as they see fit — is authorized and regulated by the House Committee on House Administration, as well as by law and chamber rules.

Q. How much money is in each Member’s MRA?

A. It varies. The formula for calculating an individual Member’s MRA is a lump-sum that everyone gets, plus a variable amount based on three variables: how far the Member’s district is from Washington (to scale travel costs), the cost of living in the Member’s district (to scale district-office rental costs), and the number of non-business postal addresses in the Member’s district (to scale constituent mail costs). If you would like to see the actual formula, you can find it on page 2371 of the current Statement of Disbursements of the House. That document also provides the total amount given to each Member, as well as the itemized breakdown of all expenditures by each Member in the previous quarter.

Q. So…how much money does each Member get?

A. For calendar year 2010 (technically session-year, which runs from January 3 to January 2), the median amount was about $1.5 million. At the start of the 112th Congress, H.Res.22 reduced the authorized amount by 5% for 2011 and 2012 as part of a general reduction in expense funding for House leadership, committees, and Members. So while I haven’t run the numbers for this year, it’s about in the $1.4 million range.

Q. What can the MRA be spent on?

A. In general, four categories of expenses: staff, travel, office expenses, and mail. The general guidelines is that the MRA can only be spent on official representational business. If you want the full details, check out the Members’ handbook issued by the Committee on House Administration.

Q. What proportion do Members typically spend in each category?

A. Mostly staff. Typically, you’ll see about 65-70% of the MRA spent on Washington and district staff. (Representatives are limited to 18 full-time and 4 part-time staff or interns). After that, it varies: some Members send a lot of mail to their constituents, others travel back to their district a lot.  A number of studies have examined the publicly-available data if you would like precise numbers. Here’s a recent one. And on average, about 10% of the MRA goes unspent.

Q. Unspent? I thought Representatives were underfunded and staff underpaid?

A. They may well be, but there are two issues. The first is basic accounting: Members can’t borrow money against the next session or the next Congress if they run out of their MRA, so they have to budget in a buffer. More importantly, however, there is a strong downward democratic pressure on Members to be thrifty. Constituents do not like seeing Members spend money unnecessarily, and one way to look penny-wise is to not use all the money given to you.

Q. How much do the staffers make?

A. Again, it varies. Entry level staff assistants may make less than $30k annually. The maximum staff salary in the House under the 2009 Speaker’s Pay Order is $168,411 annually. The 2010 House Compensation Study provides a good survey of different salaries for different positions in a Member’s office. For a primer on who’s who in the Member’s office, see my old post.

Q. Maximum salary? I thought Member’s could spend the MRA as they see fit?

A. Not exactly. In addition to the regulations issued by House Administration, there are other guidelines under statute and regulation. Most of them are common sense or common ethics rules: restrictions on hiring your relatives, requirements that people you pay actually do work commensurate with the pay, and so forth. Under law, the Speaker is also authorized to issue guidelines setting maximum salaries for various positions.

Q. But wait, how can all this money be spent without an appropriation? I thought the Constitution required that?

A. It does. And there is. The money authorized for the MRA by the Committee on House Administration is just that, an authorization. The actual funding is appropriated in the annual Legislative Branch Appropriations Act.

Q. How much is appropriated for the MRA?

A. In FY2012, it was $573.9 million, in P.L. 112-74, the FY12 Consolidated Appropriations Act.

Q. And that covers all staff and resource expenses?

A. For Representatives’ personal offices, yes (well, mostly; see below). But that figure doesn’t include committee funding, leadership funding, or funding for administrative support offices (such as the Clerk’s Office). Nor does it include any of the funding for the Senate staff (personal or otherwise), or any of the other offices of the legislative branch (such as CBO, the Library of Congress, CRS, Capitol Police, etc.). The entire Legislative Branch Appropriations Act is about $4.3 billion annually, which sounds like a lot, until you remember that total federal outlays are about 1000 times that.

Q. So the total cost of maintaining Representatives’ personal offices is about half a billion?

A. It’s a little more than that, actually. Because that total MRA appropriation doesn’t include the government’s portion of the contributions to employee pensions and benefits. Those are appropriated separately in the Legislative Branch bill. There are also other expenses — such as the maintenance and upkeep of the physical offices in Washington — that are picked up in appropriations to other Legislative branch entities, such as the Architect of the Capitol. And it also doesn’t include the salaries of the actual Members, which runs about $76 million total (441 Members and Delegates X $174,000 annual salary + a bit more for leaders), or the government side of their pension and benefit contributions.

Q. So are staff underpaid?

A. That’s an open question. Many staffers certainly think they are. And the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch has regularly worried in committee reports accompanying the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill about losing staff to the private sector, and the need to pay staff more in order to remain competitive. Most Members certainly wish they had more staff, and more ability to pay their existing staff. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who think that congressional staff are overpaid or, in some cases, completely unnecessary. Governor Perry, for instance.

Q. So it looks like it would take about 10 or 15 times as much money to get to Gobry’s $20m/Member budget level. Thoughts?

A. First impression is that it’s political impossible. For the House alone — and again, we’re just talking about the personal office staff, not the committees or the leadership or anything else — you are talking about $8 billion. That’s almost double what we’re spending on the entire legislative branch right now.

Q. But like you said, it’s a drop in the bucket relative to total federal spending?

A. True. But it’s very, very hard to increase spending — even marginally — in the Legislative Branch.

Q. How come?

A. As noted above, constituents tend not to look kindly upon Members who vote to increase stuff that is perceived to be “for them.” This is most directly felt on Member pay. But it affects virtually all spending in the House and Senate. Members have a very difficult time casting votes to increase money that goes to themselves or their staff. Even the upkeep of the Capitol building and the surrounding complex can raise the political ire of some constituents.

Q. But the Legislative Branch bill gets passed each year, no?

A. Indeed, it does. But it also has historically come to the floor under a closed rule, in order to prevent amendments being offered that would slash things like staff pay. (In recent years, almost all appropriations bills have come to the floor under closed rules. That, however, is a new trend. Twenty years ago, typically on the Leg Branch bill would come to the floor closed). The basic rule of thumb is this: if a vote is going to be taken on the floor that seeks to cut Member pay, or Hill staff salaries, that vote is going to pass. Regardless of personal feelings, Members just feel that they cannot cast votes against those kinds of amendments. And there are always plenty of Members with strong incentives to propose such amendments. Thus, a closed rule is the only safe way to go.

Q. So how do they ever increase Member or staff pay?

A. Two ways, typically. One is the way mentioned above: keep increases in the overall spending and the staff spending in the Legislative Branch bill very modest — often lower than most or all other appropriations bills — and then bring it to the floor under a closed rule to prevent any amendments that seek to cut pay. The other way is the method used with Member pay: put in place a system of cost-of-living increases — increases that can never be higher than the increases for general federal workers — which automatically go into effect unless they are specifically denied. Then prevent denial votes or amendments from coming to the floor, except in cases when there is genuine consensus to deny.

Q. So what are the prospects for an increase in Member staff resources?

A. I don’t like to make strong predictions of this sort, but I’d say in the near term: zero.

Q. But is it a good idea in theory?

A. Well, again, that depends on your axiomatic values. Personally, I’d like to see legislative branch staffing beefed up a bit, but that’s mostly because I see it not only as a general good for a legislature, but also as a relative good for a legislature vis a vis the executive. As I’ve written before (here and here), information production and dissemination is a serious weapon the branches can use against each other in political battles, and in my view, the legislature could use a more even balance with the President right now.

Q. What other considerations are there?

A. One is how you feel about where to distribute resources in the House. Right now, Member offices spend a lot of their resources dealing with constituent casework. If resources for Member offices were expanded, Members could arguably assign more staff to policy work, which might be beneficial if you believe the Member offices should be carrying a larger load of the policy development. But institutionally, the rules of the House and the allocation of resources right now all point toward the committee system having the lion’s share of the load for policy development. So it might make more sense to strengthen the resources of the committees. In any case, from a political point of view, a move to double or ten-fold increase the resources of the Members’ offices would likely consider increasing the resources of the committees as well, I would think.

Another issue is the leadership. Unlike Member or committee resources, leadership resources have grown dramatically over the past 20 years, and have altered the balance of informational power between backbenchers and leaders. That’s one thing that isn’t raised by Ezra’s review of lobbying; the leadership has many of the same incentives for legislative subsidy that lobbyist do: they provide information to assist backbenchers, and backbenchers employ that information on issues that they can’t spend their valuable time or resources for independent research. So increasing the staff and research budgets of the Members’ offices theoretically weakens the leadership’s ability to dominate backbenchers via information control. Which obviously muddies the politics.

Q. You mentioned committee funds. How does that work?

A. Oh, geez. Maybe next week.

Previous “Q&A” style posts

March 5, 2012 — Democratic Appropriations Subcommittee Assignment in the House.

March 2, 2012 — Filling the tree in the Senate.

December 15, 2011 — Rule Layover Waivers in the House.

December 5, 2011 — How a bill becomes a law. Literally.

November 29, 2011 — The other caucuses. The ones in Congress.

Kevin Drum wondered last night if the conventional wisdom about California in the GOP primaries might be wrong:

One thing to keep in mind if you’re not from California is that our Republicans are not like, say, Maine Republicans: kind of moderate because they live in a basically liberal state. California Republicans are fire-breathing, take-no-prisoners, down-with-the-ship Republicans. I live in Orange County, which most people think of as ground zero for conservatism in the Golden State, and it’s true that we’re pretty conservative here. Our county board of directors routinely turns down federal money if it’s sullied in any way with connections to Obamacare. Still, as near as I can tell, OC Republicans are pussycats compared to Central Valley Republicans. I don’t know if the Central Valley Rs are more conservative than Alabama Republicans, but they’d sure give them a run for their money.

I don’t know very much about California state politics, but I do know that there’s some indirect evidence that might help us assess the last question, regarding the relative conservatism of California Republicans vs. Alabama Republicans. We can look at the voting records of their respective Representatives in the House.

Below is a plot of the average DW-Nominate scores of various partisan congressional delegations from the 111th Congress. The number next to each state is the state’s ranking among co-partisan delegations as to its tendency toward moderation (i.e. NY was the 5th most liberal GOP delegation; Idaho was the most conservative Dem delegation). Aside from California and Alabama, the states on the plot were not chosen by any algorithm; they are just there to give you the lay of the land.

You can see that California’s GOP delegation in the 111th Congress was, on average, more conservative than the average GOP Representative. The delegation ranked 31st most liberal out of the 41 states that had GOP Members in the 111th. Note that Alabama ranked 13th most liberal of GOP delegations. So based on this evidence (which is obviously indirect; we’ll get to caveats in a minute), Kevin’s most narrow point is well-taken: from a purely ideological point-of-view, it may be the case that Santorum or Gingrich might have more appeal in California than is typically assumed right now. Or at least the converse is not true: we don’t have any evidence that the Alabama GOP electorate is more conservative than the California GOP electorate.

More generally, I think the narrow takeaway point here is that there are a lot of surprises when you try to deduce the leanings of the primary electorate of a state based on that states general liberal-conservative reputations. For instance, it’s almost certainly wrong to assume that because California is a generally liberal state, it’s conservatives will be less conservative than those in a state that is generally more conservative. Another good example of this is Wisconsin, which I think we can fairly say is thought of as a liberal or liberal-moderate state overall. Indeed, its Dem delegation in the House was the 41st most conservative (i.e. 6th most liberal), on average, in the 11th Congress. But it’s GOP delegation was the 39th most liberal (i.e. the 3rd most conservative).

Now, for the caveats. Let’s start with the methodological ones. This is indirect evidence, at best. All sorts of disconnects exist between the DW-Nominate scores of Representatives from the 111th Congress and the ideology of the GOP primary voters in a state. To name just five: Reps are a small sample; Reps come from gerrymandered districts, not states, and those districts may be more/less polarized across states; conversely, GOP primary voters also exist in Dem districts; this was two years ago; and Member-district ideologies can diverge. The point is that you shouldn’t take this is some sort of smokin’ gun about primary voter preferences in California. It’s a lot closer to meaningless than it is to that. Just to highlight what I mean, Romney cleaned up in Arizona’s closed primary, which was the most conservative GOP delegation in the House in the 111th Congress.

Of course, this only begs a more important caveat: does the DW-Nominate scores of the House delegation sort along the same measure of ideology that is separating GOP primary voters between Romney and not-Romney? I haven’t looked into this enough to say, but my instinct is that it may very well not. Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich are all laying down pretty conservative policy positions, so the differences between them may have as much to do with style or messaging as they have to do with the actual policy differences of the type that could be picked up by something like a DW-Nominate score in the minds of voters. And so even if it’s true that California Republicans are more conservative than Alabama Republicans, it may also be the case that certain frames (such as an anti-Massachusetts attitude) are much more prevalent in Alabama than in California.

And yet, none of this is the main caveat, which undoubtedly remains the same as it has been for months: voter ideology, or voters in general for that matter, may have little left to independently say in the primary. This is because a fair amount of GOP primary voter belief (or any primary voter belief ) is really a coordination game being driven by party actors and party media outlets, who seem less and less likely to show any enthusiasm for the toppling of Romney in favor of Santorum. Which, of course, simply reiterates the fundamental truth of what is going on: California may matter this year, in the sense that Romney may not have the delegates to put him over the top by then, but the nomination in my view has been sewn up (save for Act of God type external shocks) for quite some time.