Below is a chart I made during lunch today that plots the number of public laws passed by October 1 of the first session of Congress vs. the number of laws passed during the remaining 15 months of the Congress. It plots the past 19 Congresses (93rd-111th) and a predicted value for the 112th (labeled in purple). Unified government is labeled in green and divided government is labeled in red (the 107th Congress, when Jeffords switched parties, is labeled as divided). The lot does not differentiate between major and trivial legislatio n; it is strictly limited to the number of public laws.

Four comments :

1) In general, only a small percentage of legislation is passed prior to October 1 of the first session. Over the 20 Congresses in the plot, an average of only 16% of the total legislation in a Congress is passed prior to 10/1 of the first session. This is both surprising and not surprising. It’s not surprising because it takes time to develop legislation and move it through the chambers; committees need to hold hearings, write bills, mark them up, and then jockey for floor time. On the other hand, 16% is still a lot lower than I would have guessed, especially since the second session almost always wraps up its second session work prior to the election in November.

2) There is an unsurprising positive correlation between the two variables. Simply put, Congresses that pass more legislation prior to 10/1 first session tend to pass more legislation post-10/1. Not rocket science. And also not that important, because a huge part of the absolute volume difference is institutional:  we haven’t filtered out trivial commemorative legislation or other non-controversial items, and my guess is that they drive a lot of the result. Prior to the 1995 ban on such legislation, commemoratives were a sizable chunk of all public laws. So a high volume of pre-10/1 legislation is likely to correspond to a high volume of post-10/1 legislation — there were just lots of non-controversial public laws at all times. And that’s the case: all of the highest volume years are pre-1995; all but one of the lowest are post-1995.

3) The 35 public laws passed by the 112th Congress is not a huge X-axis outlier. It’s the second lowest absolute number, but the pre-10/1 output of the 112th is not all that much less than other post-1995 divided Congresses. As mentioned above, comparing the 112th to a pre-1995 Congress raises the issue or the commemorative legislation. I haven’t gone back and filtered that out of the older Congresses, but I suspect it would have a large effect.

4) The outliers (may) tell an odd story. Notice the five biggest outliers from the trendline, circled in red. Those are instances in which either a proportionately large amount of legislation was passed after 10/1 (96th and 106th) or a proportionately small amount of legislation was passed after 10/1 (103rd, 110th, 111th).  What’s odd about those Congresses is that they all preceded changes from either unified to divided government (96th, 103rd, 111th) or from divided government to unified government (106th and 110th — although the Jeffords switch quickly reversed the 106th point). In fact, in the entire sample. on the 94th Congress preceded a change from unified/divided government and did not stray from the trendline.

I don’t know what to make of this. I guess we could make up a story about the coming election tides either locking up Congress or getting it into gear. But the pattern doesn’t match up how we might expect: if that story was true, then we’d expect a unified government to get into gear when they were about to lose control, and a divided government to lock up when one side or the other looked poised for victory. Instead, we get lockup in both the 110th and 111th, one of which created unified government and the other of which created divided government.

So perhaps it’s a spurious finding. But it’s a darn interesting one. If anyone has seen any research on legislative productivity as it relates to perceived coming changes in unified/divided government, let me know.

Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent describes the Senate as ‘out of touch’ over its likely vote-down of a jobs bill:

The key provisions in the jobs bill have strong public support. They are backed by majorities of moderates and independents. Unemployment is basically a national emergency. Yet we’re now at the point where we don’t even know if a simple majority of the Senate will support a sensible, balanced measure to deal with that emergency — Dems can probably only afford to lose two or three defectors — that contains ideas that both parties have supported in the past.

People constantly say things like this when the Senate rejects an idea that seems popular in public opinion. But one simple explanation is often forgotten: the Senate is malapportioned!

Yes, everyone “knows” that, but a lot of times people seem to overlook one of the basic consequences: a Senate vote will often not match aggregate public opinion, even if every single Senator is explicitly following the public opinion of his/her constituents. Unlike the House, which at least theoretically is weighted like a public opinion poll, the structure of the Senate makes no pretense to being a reflection of national public opinion. (Of course, the House can suffer the same problem; any aggregation of district preferences — no matter how perfectly apportioned — could stray from national preferences. But it’s much more pronounced in the Senate).

Now, you can ask Senators to take a Burkean trustee view of representation and vote the national good. That may or may not be warranted in any individual case, including this one. But I think it’s a fallacy to imply in these situations that at least some Senators must be inherently doing something against the wishes of their constituents if national public opinion goes one way and the Senate goes another. The institution, for better or worse, is simply not built that way.

That’s the claim Yoni Appelbuam made over the weekend. Over at his excellent blog, Seth Masket rejects the thesis:

I can’t claim to be any sort of an expert on the Gilded Age economy. I’m sure Appelbaum pursues this line of research in greater detail elsewhere, and I really don’t have data to counter him here. But given how little power presidential speeches actually have, I’m skeptical of his argument. Were investors really so skittish and naive as to believe that the claims of a presidential nominee were soon to become law? Even if Bryan were to somehow win (McKinley beat him 51-47), would he be able to get this agenda through Congress? (Republicans held a 246-104 majority in the House at the time Bryan delivered his speech.)

I suppose this is possible. I mean, if Rick Perry were nominated next year and gave a speech at his convention promising to move the U.S. to a monetary system based solely on tungsten, yeah, some folks might panic a bit. But my guess would be that the relationship between Bryan’s 1896 address and American economic problems was one of correlation rather than causation.

I don’t have the economic data (or chops) either, but I think there’s a case to be made for causation. Not causation based on the speech itself, but based on how the speech affected the convention and what the convention revealed to the markets. I guess this puts me somewhere in the middle between Appelbaum and Masket. I don’t think the speech itself could have possibly crashed the economy. But the speech was both reflective of, and constitutive to, the information that the markets were incorporating from the convention. Here’s the story:

Prior to the convention, it was almost certainly known to the markets that the clear majority of delegates were silver men. But it wasn’t obvious that silver was going to win in either the platform or with the nominee. Especially the latter: the 2/3 rule, in place at the Democratic conventions since 1832, required that a candidate get a supermajority for nomination. And from a general election point of view, the Democratic Party in the late 19th century was built on a shaky proposition: combine the solid south with western populism but somehow also win New York and a handful of other northern states. The only successful path to doing this was to subsume the majority silver faction to a pro-gold northerner, and keep the platform either silent or watery on money issues.  Given that such a logic had held in 1892, and there was a pro-gold Democrat in the White House (Cleveland), both the eastern Democratic establishment and their financial friends might have been optimistic going into the convention.

But at the convention, it suddenly became clear that the silver men were no longer interested in compromise. They had the delegates and intended to wield power. The outgoing national party committee, still narrowly in favor of gold, nominated a pro-gold New Yorker for temporary chair of the convention. The silver men defeated him with their own man. When the permanent roll was built, the two contested delegations (Nebraska and Michigan) were both decided in favor of silver. In short, the silver delegates at the convention  announced that, this time, they meant business: they were gathering the seats they needed to ensure 2/3 representation and allow them to nominate their own man.

But it still wasn’t clear if they would take the steps that would truly fracture the party: putting a clear silver plank into the party platform, and nominating a pro-silver candidate. The gold men argued that doing those things would guarantee a GOP victory in November, and also would result in a bolting of pro-gold northeastern Dems from the party. (Both of these things happened, although the Palmer/Buckner National Democratic ticket was not viable or competitive in the campaign). It was during the platform fight that Bryan gave his “cross of gold” speech.  And whether or not the speech had a national impact, it certainly had an impact at the convention, throwing the silver men into a complete frenzy on the floor. A 15 minute parade ensued.

After the parade, the silver plank won. And the next day, Bryan was nominated. As Richard Bensel (2007) has written, this too was a surprise: he was not considered a major candidate going into the convention. Just a two-term former Congressmen, he was only 36 years old and had recently stood for Senate and not won. He was certainly a favorite son in Nebraska and a powerful speaker, but he was not in the top handful of names in 1896 prior to the speech.

So, while I agree with Masket that the speech itself did not independently crash the economy, it was correlated with things that might have had that impact. Going into the convention, the markets knew that the Democratic Party was majority silver delegates, but that in the past the need to hold the party together had resulted in pro-gold candidates and murky non-money platforms, which had successfully won the White House in 1892. At the convention, it was revealed that the silver men were no longer compromising, were going to risk fracturing the party by putting in a strong silver plank, and planned to nominate a 36 year old Nebraskan who more or less came out of nowhere by giving the most powerful pro-silver speech to date. In effect, the Democratic Party had been captured by silver.

I would think that such a development would strongly worry the eastern financial elite. Whether it was enough to re-crash the economy, I don’t know. As I said, I don’t have the economic data (or chops).

Citations:

Bensel, Richard. 2007. A Calculated Enchatment of Passion: Bryan and the “Cross of Gold” in the 1896 Democratic National Convention. In Skowronek, Stephen and Matthew Glassman, ed. Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). pp. 77-104.

I had the day off today. It’s Columbus Day. As usual, I got a lot of gruff from my non-federal-employee neighbors who can’t even fathom having Columbus Day off. I’m pretty sure they have a point: Columbus Day is, bar far, the least legitimate federal holiday. What follows is some psuedo social science to back up this claim.

There are ten federal holidays: New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The chart below plots them on two dimensions.

1) To what degree would the event be celebrated/commemorated absent the federal holiday. Was the holiday significant prior to government recognition? Would it be without it? Does the private sector shut down? In essence, is the government holiday just a reflection of private reality, or is the holiday driven by the law.

2) To what degree is the day off itself a cultural event. Do people get together with family or friends? Are there parades? Do you go over and see your neighbors for a barbecue? Do you think/talk about it at your dinner table? In essence, to what degree do you know its a holiday besides the fact that you aren’t going to work.

Here’s an analysis of what I see in the chart.

The big four stand far ahead of the rest. Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Independence day  all rate high on both dimensions. Christmas (10 on the private-reality scale / 10 on the cultural scale) is ahead of everything else on both the private-reality dimension and the cultural significance dimension. Thanksgiving (8/9) is only slightly behind Christmas on the cultural dimension, but a few paces back on the private-reality scale. New Year’s (9/8) is probably the reverse of that: only slightly behind Christmas on the private-reality dimension, but a few paces back on cultural significance. Independence Day (8/8), I think, is a few paces back on both dimensions.

Two secondary holidays were historically more important. Both Veteran’s Day (6/4) and Memorial Day (5/3) were much more important holidays 50 years ago, from what I perceive. You still have the parades and wreath layings, but you also see some things now that would never have happened in the 50s: the public schools in my town are open on Veteran’s Day. In addition, whereas Veteran’s Day would have been an automatic private sector day off 50 years ago, today it is either not a day off or a flex day for many private sector employees.

Labor Day is a complete outlier. I didn’t put a trend line in the chart, but most of the data would have fit it nicely. Not Labor Day (1/6). That’s the one holiday that is an absolute cultural touchstone in America, but very, very few people would observe it in any way if it wasn’t a day off. It really has become a day to play hooky from work with all your neighbors.

I’m not sure how to classify either of the “person” days. Washington’s Birthday (2/1) has been stripped of a lot of meaning now that many people believe the holiday is “President’s Day.” (It’s not, at least at the federal level). They day has some historical significance, but like Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, it was probably a lot stronger in generations past. I imagine Washington’s Birthday was something of a big deal in the 19th century, even as a private celebratory day. As a contemporary matter, it has no real cultural impact that I can detect.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day (4/1) is an even tougher call. I’m pretty sure there would be strong private celebrations of it if it did not exist, especially in the African-American community (although I’m pretty sure they would be on April 4 — the day he was assassinated — not on a Monday near his birthday (January 15) ). The cultural significance is tough to judge, too. I notice a little bit every year, like speech readings and other academic things, but again, I don’t have a great sense of what goes on in the African-American community. And I suspect there might be a fair amount there.

There’s one fake holiday on both dimensions. And that’s Columbus Day. Everyone always tries to tell me that it’s a big Italian-American thing, but I’ve never seen any evidence of that. I guess the Knights of Columbus must do something, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever heard of anyone going to something like that. It’s not like the Hibernians on St. Paddy’s Day. In fact, I think the counter-protests to the day (which I saw first hand at Yale) were the only discernible group event I ever saw.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about representation. And how it’s changing. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how the modern communications environment — social media, the blogs, twitter, and so on — has changed the representational contexts for Members of the House, and consequentially their representational capacities and strategies.

Much of this is still congealing in my head, but here are five tentative observations:

1) The opportunities for surrogate representation have increased dramatically. 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) 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.

2) But so has the pressure to nationalize your representation. One consequence I see to this increased capacity for nationalizing your representation is that the very existence of the possibility has coincided with at least some necessity of doing so, even if you don’t want to. Member communications used to be pretty simple. For example, back in the 90s, when I was a lowly intern in a House Member’s office, the sorting procedure for the incoming mail was pretty simple: if it was from our district, put it in the priority pile. If it was from outside the district, determine whether it was personal mail from a constituent. If it was, put it in another pile so that we could direct it to the correct office. If it was from outside the district and not personal constituent mail, throw it away.

Now? Even if Members would prefer only to interact with their electoral constituents, it’s not possible.  The volume of email and other electronic communications coming into the House is dwarfing traditional mail, and there’s no quick way to tell if it’s coming from your district or not. 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.

But it goes deeper than this. Electoral challengers are 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 psuedo-activists to target the incumbent and its a no-brainer. And thus Members choosing not to undertake a new media strategy are at a serious disadvantage. And pretty much any new media strategy is inherently a nationalized strategy from a infrastructure perspective.

3) 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 distict, 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 constitency that the Member sees — 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 constitunecy 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.

4) But the constituents themselves may be nationalizing. Nationalizing their representational profile, of course, is also potentially dangerous from a Member perpsective. 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 contorl.

5) I think this may be playing a part in the recent trend of nationalized House elections. 2006, 2008, and 2010 were all House elections in which national politics was said to play an unusually big role, at least in comparison to the conventional wisdom about House elections and the local/national divide. There are all sorts of hypotheses that we can come up with to explain this. But one is simply that voters, challengers, and Members are all themselves more embedded into a national political culture, in no small part because of the information firehouse and the communications technology. Thay may be a consequecne of other trends — such as ideological sorting of the parties — but it also may be a constitutive cause of such trends. Or both. It’s obviously far too small a sample to definitively say that old-school local House elections are a dying breed, but at this point I wouldn’t bet against it without some odds.

Yesterday was the 153rd anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debate at Galesburg — October 7, 1858, the fifth of the seven debates the two men had between August and October that year. To me, it is the finest of the debates to read, and I highly recommend sitting down with its full text.

Douglas and Lincoln represented something of the center right and center left of northern opinion on slavery in 1858; Lincoln a clear anti-slavery man but far from an abolitionist, Douglas personally opposed to slavery and far from a friend to the south, but completely opposed to any anti-slavery movement that might threaten the union and fundamentally against the idea of one state telling another how to mange its internal affairs in a federal union. In the debate, each sought to attack the weakness of the other’s position by promoting their own. And listening to each reckon with the moral aspect of slavery and the seriousness of the threat to the union, all within the context of a political-electoral speech, is undeniably moving.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were set up with one man speaking for 60 minutes, the other for 90, and then the first again for 30. They took turns going first; in Galesburg, Douglas went first. The most interesting part of his speech, for me, was when he emphatically derided the rise of the Republican Party. Over 100 years after the war ended, in his incredible history of the 1850’s, David Potter wrote about the metamorphosis of the political parties:

If Calhoun had been alive to witness [the 1856 election], he might have observed a further snapping of the cords of Union [that he spoke about in 1850]. The Whig cord has snapped between 1852 and 1856, and the Democratic cord had been drawn very taut by the sectional distortion of the party’s geographical equilibrium. It could not stand much more tension without snapping also. As for the Republican party, it claimed to be the only one that asserted nationalist principles, but it was totally sectional in its constituency, with no pretense to bisectionalism, and it could not be regarded as a cord of union at all.

Douglas, speaking first at Galesburg, made much the same point:

Now, let me ask you whether the country has any interest in sustaining this organization known as the Republican party. That party is unlike all other political organizations in this country. All other parties have been national in their character — have avowed their principles alike in the slave and free States, in Kentucky as well as Illinois, in Louisiana as well as in Massachusetts. Such was the case with the Old Whig party, and such was and is the case with the Democratic party. Whigs and Democrats could proclaim their principles boldly and fearlessly in the North and in the South, in the East and in the West, wherever the Constitution ruled and the American flag waved over American soil.

But now you have a sectional organization, a party which appeals to the Northern section of the Union against the Southern, a party which appeals to Northern passion, Northern pride, Northern ambition, and Northern prejudices, against Southern people, the Southern States, and Southern institutions. The leaders of that party hope that they will be able to unite the Northern States in one great sectional party, and inasmuch as the North is the stronger section, that they will thus be enabled to outvote, conquer, govern, and control the South. Hence you find that they now make speeches advocating principles and measures which cannot be defended in any slave-holding State of this Union, Is there a Republican residing in Galesburg who can travel into Kentucky, and carry his principles with him across the Ohio? What Republican from Massachusetts can visit the Old Dominion without leaving his principles behind him when he crosses Mason’s and Dixon’s line? Permit me to say to you in perfect good humor, but in all sincerity, that no political creed is sound which cannot be proclaimed fearlessly in every State of this Union where the Federal Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

When Lincoln spoke, he did not address this political concern directly. But I love this section, which touches the idea:

The judge tells us, in proceeding, that he is opposed to making any odious distinctions between free and slave States. I am altogether unaware that the Republicans are in favor of making any odious distinctions between the free and slave States. But there still is a difference, I think, between Judge Douglas and the Republicans in this. I suppose that the real reference between Judge Douglas and his friends and the Republicans, on the contrary, is that the judge is not in favor of making any difference between slavery and liberty — that he is in favor of eradicating, of pressing out of view, the questions of preference in this country for free or slave institutions; and consequently every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is any wrong in slavery. Everything that emanates from him or his coadjutors in their course of policy carefully excludes the thought that there is anything wrong in slavery. All their arguments, if you will consider them, will be seen to exclude the thought that there is anything whatever wrong in slavery. If you will take the judge’s speeches, and select the short and pointed sentences expressed by him, — as his declaration that he “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or down,” — you will see at once that this is perfectly logical, if you do not admit that slavery is wrong. If you do admit that it is wrong, Judge Douglas cannot logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. Judge Douglas declares that if any community wants slavery they have a right to have it. He can say that logically, if he says that there is no wrong in slavery; but if you admit that there is a wrong in it, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.

He insists that, upon the score of equality, the owners of slaves and owners of property — of horses and every other sort of property — should be alike, and hold them alike in a new Territory. That is perfectly logical, if the two species of property are alike, and are equally founded in right. But if you admit that one of them is wrong, you cannot institute any equality between right and wrong. And from this difference of sentiment — the belief on the part of one that the institution is wrong, and a policy springing from that belief which looks to the arrest of the enlargement of that wrong; and this other sentiment, that it is no wrong, and a policy sprung from that sentiment which will tolerate no idea of preventing that wrong from growing larger, and looks to there never being an end of it through all the existence of things — arises the real difference between Judge Douglas and his friends on the one hand, and the Republicans on the other. Now, I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, having due regard for its actual existence amongst us, and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations which have been thrown about it; but who, nevertheless, desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.

The contrast is striking, especially since Douglas and Lincoln are both northerners and both are happy that there is no slavery in Illinois. They are, in the big picture, on the same side. At least relative to the southerners. This should give you some idea of how difficult the abolitionists had it, and how much variety of opinion existed in the north, even when you excluded the pro-southern doughfaces (which, of course, some counted Douglas among prior to his fallout with the Buchanan administration over Kansas) and the outright pro-slavery northerners.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates are also important because of the implicit structural commentary they provide. As I’ve written about before, they are the most important example of why the 17th amendment was necessary, and why it shouldn’t be repealed, especially if you value federalism: these “races” for Senate were distorting state elections. This is one of the dirty little secrets of the 19th century. Lincoln and Douglas were running for the U.S. Senate, but they weren’t actually running; the voters listening to those debates were only going to be allowed to vote for the state legislature (and U.S. House, of course), which in turn would select Lincoln (if the Republicans had control) or Douglas (as it happened, when the Democrats won control).

See the potential problem? In an election ostensibly for state officials, many voters were making their decision based on the consequences for the national government. This accelerated in the later 19th century, to the point where state-level candidates were sometimes nothing more than pass-throughs for a Senate vote. Except that they got to run the state government for the next two years.  That’s not good if you are interested in federalism, and I don’t think it’s good in a democracy, in general. By switching to a direct vote system, not only was the Senate made a more directly democratic body, but state elections were freed from the yoke of Senate elections, allowing citizens greater freedom of personal choice when picking their state representatives.

Last night was an interesting scene in the Senate, as Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell got into some strategic maneuvering that resulted in the Senate overruling the presiding officer and setting a new precedent regarding dilatory motions post-cloture. The best write-up I’ve seen is Sarah Binder’s at the Monkey Cage, which also includes a helpful explanatory comment from Stephen Smith. I agree with both of them that what happened last night is not particularly analogous the “nuclear option” in the way that some media and blog commentators are likening it. There was no constitutional question addressed; the Senate simply set a new precedent. It may be a foreshadowing of things to come, but in and of itself it was a not-super-uncommon method for arriving at a new minor restriction in the post-cloture rights of the minority.

As quick as possible, here’s what happened: Cloture had been invoked. Reid and McConnell were negotiating for some amendments to come to the floor. A motion was made to suspend the rules so that a non-germane amendment — not normally allowed in this situation — could be offered. Reid made a point of order that a motion to suspend to the rules was dilatory under Rule XXII. On the advice of the parliamentarian, the presiding officer disagreed, and ruled that the motion was fine. Reid appealed the ruling, meaning that the Senate would vote to sustain or overrule the presiding officer. They overruled, which in effect sets a new Senate precedent that motions to suspend the rules are dilatory if offered post-cloture, and therefore can be struck by a point of order.

One pretty technical question someone asked me that I think is worth reviewing is this: why didn’t McConnell and the GOP filibuster the vote on the appeal of the ruling of the chair? There’s a pretty simple answer: the Senate was operating under the post-cloture rules of Senate Rule XXII, which include the following: Points of order, including questions of relevancy, and appeals from the decision of the Presiding Officer, shall be decided without debate. Under regular order in the Senate, McConnell could have prevented the vote on the appeal of the ruling, since (most) appeals are fully debatable. But because the Senate was operating under post-cloture rules, Reid could appeal the ruling knowing that the motion to appeal was not debatable, and thus would immediately be entitled to majority vote. Had a similar situation arose under regular order, Reid would have been in a much tougher situation. Since the appeal could be filibustered, that would have been a dead-end, since a stalemate would presumably have forced the Majority Leader to bargain and cave to some GOP demands.

The larger point for people to remember is that invoking cloture on something doesn’t end the proceedings; it simply activates the post-cloture rules as found in Rule XXII. Those rules, among other things, put a cap on total remaining debate (30 hours), allow only germane amendments that were written and filed prior to cloture, and empower the chair to dispense with certain dilatory motions. In practice, once cloture is achieved many of the Rule XXII rights (especially the right to 30 more hours of debate) are waived by unanimous consent. But if the minority wants to play hardball and/or make a point, they can drag out votes for quite some time after cloture is invoked. And that has consequences, particularly if there are multiple cloture motions that will have to be sequentially invoked in order to move the legislation.

Someone asked me an interesting question today: what percentage of Senators were born in the same state that they represent? The answer for the 112th Congress is 58%. That got me thinking about the question historically; what does the trend look like? It’s not obvious what the answer should be — you have the cross-cutting forces of 19th century western expansion (which presumably means lots of western Members who were born in the east) and much lower geographical mobility (which presumably means a much higher citizen population in each state that was born in the state).

Anyway, I went and grabbed enough data to get a quick and dirty answer. The chart below plots the percentage of Representatives and Senators who were born in the same state they currently represent, from the 1st through the 104th Congress (I don’t have the more recent data handy).

Three points:

1) The historical trends are probably due to expansion and mobility. The downward trend in the 19th century almost certainly reflects Representatives and Senators from new western states, where the percentage of people born out of state was extremely high for quite some time. The upward trend in the first half of the 20th century probably reflects the end of new state creation and the generational effect of more people being born in the western states. The downward trend after world war two is almost certainly due to increased geographic mobility, both because a greater number of people live in more than one state in their life, and also because this creates less voter attachment to “their” state. I’ve never seen any writing that posits a relationship between the fact that the early west was populated by non-westerners and the behavior of the Members such people elected, but the non-local roots of westerners certainly played a role in territorial politics, so I imagine there might be some fruit there for an enterprising scholar.

2) The gap between the Senate and the House. There are a bunch of theoretical stories that we can come up with to explain it. One is that Representatives have had, historically, a closer electoral relation to the people than Senators, and thus we might expect that the people prefer Representatives who are from their community. Another would be a  17th amendment story — that the state legislature tended to not care if someone was from the state, whereas the citizen population was more concerned with such factors and thus more often chose home-states. Both of these theories would explain the closing of the gap in the mid-20th century, as Senators were popularly elected beginning in 1914 (one cycle complete in 1918) and (in a not-unrelated development) began behaving more like Representatives in their constituent-relations activities.

3) The South. Using ICPSR definitions of the region (i.e confederacy minus Tennessee) and not counting the 37th-39th Congresses (1861-1867), here’s the chart:

Two things stand out, neither of which is particularly surprising. First, it appears that historically, a higher percentage of southern Representatives and Senators were born in-state. I suspect this is also true of the northeast, and confirms the hypothesis that western Members are the cause of the lower aggregate in-state numbers. Second point: the post-civil war carpetbagging is plain to see, and quite striking. Not until around the 51st-55th Congresses do the in-state Representative numbers return to pre-war levels. That was the 1890s!

It looks like there is renewed interest among some Senators for biennial budgeting — that is, budgeting and appropriating for the federal government on a 2-year calendar instead of an annual calendar. The Senate Budget Committee held a hearing yesterday on the topic, and both Chairman Conrad and Ranking Member Sessions seems quite interested in submitting legislation to the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction that would include, among other budget process changes, provisions for biennial budgeting . Two other biennial budgeting bills (S. 211 and S. 1274) are also  floating around the Senate right now.

This is an idea that has been kicking around Congress for decades, and it has a very simple allure: if the budget and appropriations process only happened once per Congress, not only would there be more time to craft the appropriations bills, but there also would be an entire session of Congress in which no such bills had to be produced, allowing for better oversight and an overall reduction in the appropriations workload. Similarly, agencies would benefit from a 2-year perspective, as all three budgetary phases (development, execution, and auditing) would overlap less, allowing each to receive more careful consideration.

Count me as a skeptic. Five quick points, two big picture and three mechanical:

1) The institutional structure is probably not the problem. Everyone keeps saying that the current budget and appropriations process is broken. But fundamentally, the difficulty with the current process is ideological; it’s a political problem. People disagree on how much total money the federal government should spend, and to what priorities that money should be distributed. Yes, the Senate floor moves slowly and, yes, the committee calendars are quite crowded from February to July, but I’m not sure expanding the time available would remedy that. Part of the politics at this point relies on the idea of looming deadlines forcing concessions; if you move those deadlines back, you are just as likely to see the gamesmanship expand to fill that space as you are to see it remedy the problem. And thus you might end up with the appropriations process taking up more time than it previously did, and sucking the political oxygen out of an even greater portion of the calendar.

And look, I’m certainly not one to tell you that institutions don’t matter. Quite the opposite. But in this case, people are looking at the wrong institutions. The appropriations bills are hardly different than other legislation; in fact, they have some institutional advantages over regular legislation in terms of their ability to move through the chambers. The only thing that makes them different is that, unlike regular legislation that stands or falls against the status quo, if the appropriations bills don’t pass, the status quo shifts to shutdown. If your concern is that the appropriations bills get bogged down and eat up too much of the legislative calendar, then your concerns are bigger than the appropriations bills; it becomes a question of anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate, or inter-chamber gridlock, etc. All of which largely return us to an ideological fight. None of which disappear under biennial budgeting.

2) Biennial budgeting would probably raise the stakes. Presumably, the intensity of the political fight over a biennial budget resolution and any biennial appropriations bills would be pretty big. If you think the current, annual process has too much brinkmanship, what would the biennial process look like as the fiscal 2-year deadline approached? After all, it would be the only chance for Members elected to a given Congress to put their mark on regular appropriations legislation. Ditto for the lobbyist and interest groups, executive branch agencies, and the President. It’s hard to imagine it not becoming a crisis point. And without the threat of next year’s budget season starting, you’d have one less reason to end the standoff.

3) It might just spill over into an increase in supplementals. If you try to plan 30-months out, as the biennial process would force agencies to do, there’s going to be a lot of noise in the forecast. Which means that Congress will be faced with two choices: give the President / OMB / agency heads wider latitude in the off-year budgets, or write a lot more supplemental and emergency appropriations Acts than under the current process. Neither choice is great, but the latter is particularly worrisome; if the point is to streamline appropriations and save time/energy, moving supplemental bills through both chambers is a serious drag on any efficiency gains.

4) What would the calendar look like? Right now the president submits his budget in February for the fiscal year that starts in October. If you kept that but made it a 2-year system, then you wouldn’t gain any time on the front end; you’d still have to have it done by September 30. All the potential gains would be in the out-year. So we’d almost certainly see as much omnibus legislation and brinkmanship as we currently see, all else equal. And probably more because the outcome would be twice as important. Another option would be to make the 2-years funded by any Congress include the first year of the following Congress; in effect, the current Congress would not need to do any appropriations bills until October 1 of the second session. But this has problems too. It leaves the process looming over the entire Congress, and places the deadline right in front of the election. Second, it might encourage Members to run out the clock if political advantage was waiting in the next Congress; with the stakes so high, it might make delay until after the election and start of the new Congress very attractive.

5) What would be biennial? The budget and appropriations process has at least three components that could be made biennial. First is the authorization process. Would the Defense authorization bill go biennial? Second is the budget resolution. Would it be a single, biennial resolution? Or perhaps a single action that made two annual resolutions at once? Finally, would the appropriations all become 2-year appropriations, or would it be the two separate annual appropriations, one for each of two years? Any combination of these systems could plausibly work, but it’s not clear which would be best.

Two new pieces of data today as we continue to adjust the trims on our Who Will Be the Nominee© model, neither of which I think has particular importance in shaping the ultimate answer, but both of which I think are worthy launching points for tangential discussions. First, Chris Christie has announced he’s out. Second, Herman Cain is leading the field in three new state-level polls.

I would suggest, echoing Jonathan Bernstein, that Christie’s decision was probably made more out of strategic hopelessness than out of any sort of conviction or intuition. There’s really not a great space for him to enter this field, unless his plan was to remain a Rorschach test for the hopes and dreams of conservatives across the spectrum. Which is, of course, impossible once you actually start campaigning for President. And despite the longings of the lonely northeast conservatives, this just ain’t your grandfather’s GOP, and (with apologies to Celtics fans) Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller are not walking through that door. Nor would they win the nomination if they did. And even if Christie were to run, his plan almost certainly would not have been to join Huntsman in trying to outflank Romney to the left; his path to victory, however vague, would have been to take his turn in Perry’s shoes, trying to unseat Romney from the right, I think.

With Christie out of the way and Perry seemingly falling out of invisible-primary favor, I think we are at a point in which a non-announced candidate could step into the race and make a reasonable, immediate impact. If Palin decides to run, this strikes me as the moment. Ditto Giuliani. Not that I think either of them stand much chance, or that either of them is going to run. But there is a media vacuum, of sorts, and that is plausible important, I suppose.

And this brings me to Cain. Yes, three polls conducted by one firm on one day are not worth, as they say, a warm bucket of piss. But I’m also completely not surprised that this sort of unstable opinion fluctuation is occurring. That it happened to Cain? I guess that’s a bit surprising. But that it is happening in general? Not at all. Primaries — especially large field primaries — are to a certain degree coordination games. Many of the candidates are ideologically similar and most agree with each other on the fundamental party issues. So voter opinion is fluid and shifts in opinion are hardly the stuff of iron-willed conviction. Heck, most candidate “surges” probably just reflect media attention on the newest flavor of the week, which may or may not reflect underlying reality. So any trends that happen prior to, you know, the actual primaries is likely to include a lot of fluidity if candidates don’t live up to the personality or other expectations of the half-paying-attention chattering class on any given day or week. But when the actual voting starts, we could very easily be looking at Romney vs. Perry. In fact, it’s still the odds-on favorite.

But even if the opinion polls accurately reflect the true state of the world (and not just weekly coverage variation and semi-random trends from loosely-committed voters), it’s still not surprising. Whether driven by first-person or media-filtered observation, it doesn’t seem at all unusual to me that an opinion poll is showing odd movement regarding candidate support. Non-Romney primary voters and opinion leaders are continually seeking a candidate who can defeat him; they can coordinate on different individuals until one sticks, without any penalty and without giving up their right to return to a previously-tried candidate. In fact, putting every non-Romney candidate front and center is the best way to try and bring him down; it’s not even necessary that the candidate who does the most damage become the nominee. It’s almost Darwinian: they tried Bachmann, they tried Perry, and now they are trying Cain. Soon enough they will probably be back to Perry. (Of course, if Cain continues to gain popularity, it will require a massive re-evaluation of racial theories of GOP hostility toward Obama.)

I use the word “try” loosely. It’s not like anyone is pulling the strings here on a puppet. The aggregation for such things is more natural (and thus harder to control) than any oligarchic intent, although I do think that money and opinion leaders can strongly shape it. But this leads to my final point: imagine you are the political party, or at least that you have total dictatorial control over the party. If your goal is to maximize the utility of holding the Presidency in 2013, then your basic calculation is simple: evaluate each candidate by multiplying their estimated probability of winning the office times their estimated utility as President. Off the cuff, of course, Romney scores high on the probability of winning, but probably only mediocre on utility, for a conservative party.

Cain, on the other hand, doesn’t score particularly high on either count. His probability of winning is probably somewhat lower than the other candidates, simply because he’s an inexperienced politician. And for the same reason, his utility in office is probably low. He may not have the first clue how to wield political power. But that’s not his biggest downside, from the point of view of a party in 2012. His real problem is that the variance on the estimated probability and utility is massive. His unknown qualities, which might be appealing in some contexts, are horrifying to a party in this context. The 2012 election is a rare situation in which an incumbent president might not be a favorite to win the office. That strikes me as the exact situation in which an opposition party has no interest in nominating anything but a safe candidate of known quantity, who may not have the highest potential utility, but has little danger of imploding during the general election and blowing the opportunity.

I will continue to believe this as long as Cain is popular. If the powers-that-be in the GOP have as much influence over the candidate field as I think they do (which is, to say, a decent amount), Cain cannot possibly be the nominee. Party leaders know this by strategy. The chattering class knows this by calculation. And I think the average voter knows this, by intuition. Untested candidates with little political experience might be plausibly party selections in seemingly hopeless situations. But in this case, my money is still on the GOP to select Romney, save a safe conservative arising from the ashes or Rick Perry proving himself as such.

Occupy Wall Street. Well then.

I’m hesitant to wade into these waters because of something my father — 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 something of a 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.

Three quick points:

1) Who are they and what do they want? That’s the $64k question that pretty much everyone and their brother is writing about today.  For now, they are a movement with more inertia than specific ideas. Ezra Klein goes at it here.  Nick Kristoff here. An interesting piece here. You can find suggestions for what they should demand here, and here. The ever-witty anarchist Who is IOZ? also chimes in, with expected comments.

One thing that struck me as I read the evidently-associated tumblr to the group is how much formal education they seem to have, and how important that is to their individual (and perhaps group) pysche. On the front page of the tumblr when I read it, twelve out of the fifteen essays mentioned their educational background in the first sentence or two.

In fact, a lot of angst in the essays struck me a bit on the elitist-entitled side. It has a lot of the traces of the old mugwump attitude. You “have an master’s degree from a top university” and you “can’t even get an interview”? Welcome to the real world.You’re “about to receive your PhD … from an Ivy League school” and there are “no jobs waiting for you?” How dare they! I certainly feel bad for anyone who is out of work, but I have a hard time thinking of these kinds of stories as bubbling up from a massive and increasingly-downtrodden underclass. It’s more reminiscent of the grousing I used to hear in graduate school.

2) Everyone wants to compare them to the Tea Party. From what I can see — and again I’m getting this exclusively from reading articles and examining related websites — they definitely share a certain conspiratorial populism. In fact, if you stripped away the aesthetics of each group, you might find a lot of core agreement among the two groups, especially as to who the boogeymen are: bankers, Wall Street, the federal government. You can sort of imagine coming up with a short, 300-word manifesto that both groups would be enthusiastic about, especially if you left the details vague enough.

On the other hand, Occupy Wall Street seems like the quintessential non-radical liberal social movement, almost to the point of self-parody. It’s completely amorphous and seemingly void of any thrust toward concrete political change. Those who are willing to consider themselves “spokespersons” seem to talk more about process than substance. There is constant reference to building a community, and a future time and place in which that community will have enough power that concrete change will come almost naturally. As usual: good luck, and I’ll believe it when I see it.

Maybe it’s too young or maybe it’s too early (existing liberal groups seemed to have finally taken notice and are starting to join forces), but my rule of thumb is that social movements without specific and clear goals tend to fizzle; they end up attracting every radical and his gripes, and becoming a circus platform for the same. If you think about the most successful and/or enduring social movements — the abolitionist movement; the prohibition movement; the 20th century civil rights movement; both sides of the abortion debate — they all had/have very specific concrete political goals.

This is not to say that Occupy Wall Street can’t channel it’s amorphous energy into political action — the Tea Party has been reasonably successful in going from street theater to concrete political influence — but it certainly feels like it has a long way to go.

3) This is exactly the kind of movement that liberals easily romanticize and conservatives easily dismiss. One thing I love about being a libertarian is that I tend to have lots of liberal friends and lots of conservative friends with whom I talk politics, which I think is somewhat rare. At any rate, I’m fully expecting to get the wide-eyed dreamer optimism about Occupy Wall Street from my liberal friends this week, and what I like to call the dirty-hippies-law-and-order speech from my conservative pals. Hell, I’ll be disappointed with anything less.

But I do think there’s some change in the air as far as street protest politics is concerned. My sense is that a lot of people subscribe to an old conventional wisdom that sees street protests as the province of liberals, something that conservatives just don’t do. And maybe’s that is historically true. But in the last generation or so, the picture has become much more muddled. The pro-life movement is probably the largest social movement in America, and the Tea Party has used street theater as an important tool in their political strategy. I doubt this will alter the frame through which liberals and conservatives consider Occupy Wall Street. But it’s something to think about.

Yesterday, I posted four word clouds built from presidential inaugural addresses. Here are the answers, and a brief discussion of each.

Cloud #1 is Lincoln’s 1st inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1861, on the East Portico of the Capitol. I thought this one was easy. Even if you weren’t sure, seeing the words “Union” and “Constitution” would make it your guess. And if you spotted “slavery” or “section,” then the only real possibilities are Lincoln 1861 or Buchanan 1857. I guess it would have been devious of me to put up Buchanan’s inaugural, since it could easily be mistaken in a word cloud for Lincoln’s. (Click on the clouds to enlarge them).

Lincoln first inaugural

Buchanan inaugural

One of the more striking things to see is a word cloud comparison of Lincoln’s first inaugural and his second. As many people know, the first address was focused on trying to hold the union together following the secession of the Gulf states. Lincoln makes a detailed argument about the benefits of union, the problems of secession, and the common future of the sections. The second inaugural, four years later, is toward the end of the war, and is by far the more famous: it is short, terse, and thick with religious language. It reads almost like a plea to God. Whereas “Constitution,” “States,” and “Union” are the most common words in the first, “God” and “War” are the most common in the second:

Lincoln’s second inaugural

Cloud #2 is FDR’s 1st inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1933, on the East Portico of the Capitol.

I thought this difficult, but quite gettable. If you spotted the word “emergency,” I think that gives it away: aside from Lincoln’s first inaugural, I don’t associate that word with any other inaugural besides FDR’s 1st. And I don’t think you could ever confuse Lincoln 1861 with FDR 1933 — the absence of “Union” alone would make 1861 a dubious guess.

As a side note, it’s interesting to compare FDR’s 4th inaugural (January 1945) to Lincoln’s 2nd. Both were toward the end of wars that were going to be won, but which had taken heavy tolls and were seemingly still many battles from completion. Both addresses were short, and both were very different than typical inaugurals. Here’s FDR’s 1945 cloud:

Cloud #3 is Reagan’s 1st inaugural address, delivered January 20, 1981, on the West Front of the Capitol. Cloud #4 is Obama’s inaugural address, delivered January 20, 2009, on the West Front of the Capitol.

Reagan 1981

Obama 2009

I think looking at these clouds in direct comparison is interesting because (a) they more or less have the same optimistic outlook when you scan the words, but (b) you would never mistake one for the other. For example, a quick scan of the Regan cloud prominently evokes the phrase PEOPLE MUST BELIEVE AMERICA, while the Obama cloud prominently displays NEW GENERATION AMERICA NATION. I guess those are theoretically two different ideas, but in practice they are more or less just a liberal and conservative expression of the same thing: we should be optimistic about the future of the United States, and our time is now.

One question the Reagan/Obama clouds raise is “How homogenous has the modern inaugural address become?” To give us some leverage on this, here are the Clinton 1993 and Bush 2001 clouds:

Clinton 1993 cloud

Bush 2001 cloud

As with the Reagan/Obama divide, it certainly seems like the Clinton cloud evokes a sense of America’s leading place in the world community, while the Bush cloud evokes a sense of nationalistic pride. As one might expect, the liberal cloud is somewhat more future looking, while the conservative cloud tends to emphasize the past.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the quiz.