Executive Orders - What, Me Worry?

On the editorial pages of a newspaper that can scarcely pass up an opportunity to beat the drums for war, Ruth Marcus has taken up the horror of the executive order. She's not employing in the over-the-top rhetoric of Ross Douthat, but she is concerned about the ever-present slippery slope,

Every Democrat should be nervous about President Obama’s plan for unilateral action on immigration reform.

Not because of the impact on an already gridlocked Congress, or because it risks inflaming an increasingly hostile public. Democrats should be nervous about the implications for presidential power, and the ability of a future Republican president to act on his or her own.

Perhaps Democrats have short memories, because it seems to me that we saw ample evidence of what a Republican president can accomplish through executive orders when G.W. Bush signed a huge stack of them while on his way out of the White House. Leaving that aside for the moment, we're speaking specifically of executive orders that are being proposed because Congress cannot or will not do its job. I'm not particularly concerned about setting a precedent, as there's nothing particularly unique or special about what President Obama is proposing. For that matter, were the President to refrain from acting, I have no reason to believe that a future Republican president would exercise similar restraint.

The very first concern Marcus raises is interesting, but not in the way she imagines,

First, is there a limiting principle that would constrain the president’s authority to effectively legalize everyone in the country?

Obviously, when we're speaking of this type of executive action, we're speaking of a context in which the White House wants to address an issue on which Congress refuses to speak. Executive orders must be consistent with existing law, and if Congress is willing to pass legislation it can either avoid the need for an executive order or preempt the president's plan.

Marcus's slippery slope rests on the idea that, in the face of Congressional dysfunction, a President may stake out the most extreme position he can arguably take under existing law. That's possible -- but I'm not sure that it would be a bad thing -- not because I want Presidents to sidestep Congress, but because that type of action may be the only thing that is sufficient to light a fire under Congress's posterior such that it actually does its job. If Congress won't act when faced with the most extreme interpretations of existing law, it's a fair inference that the demagoguery of its members doesn't amount to much and that they find that interpretation to be acceptable. Would it be a bigger threat to democracy for the President to stake out extreme positions, presenting the loudest possible "put up or shut up" to Congress, or for the President to tiptoe up to the edges of what might inspire Congressional action while taking advantage of that institution's unwillingness to do its job?

Marcus also argues,

Second, is there a limiting principle that would constrain future presidents inclined against enforcing other laws with which they don’t agree — and on which they’ve been unable to convince Congress to act accordingly?

As previously noted, we're speaking of executive action taken in the face of congressional inaction. Although it is conceivable that a future president might refuse to enforce the laws favored by his own party, it's far more likely that such a president would be in a position to simply ask his party to amend the law.

If a President refuses to uphold the laws of the United States in a manner that Congress finds unacceptable, Congress has a well-known constitutional remedy: impeachment. If Congress chooses not to pursue a legislative remedy, and chooses not to initiate impeachment proceedings, it again becomes difficult to regard any table-thumping condemnations of a president as anything but noise.

The situation in which Marcus's concern might have some weight would be one in which the White House and one chamber of Congress is controlled by one party, and the other chamber of Congress is controlled by another. In such a scenario, the chamber aligned with the White House would have to be sufficiently supportive of the President's actions that it would refuse to support impeachment and conviction, but be unwilling or unable to pass legislation addressing the issue due to the divided government. But legislators have easy access to the media, to make their case against a president. The House of Representatives can slow down or shut down the government, or vote to impeach even if it expects that the Senate will acquit the president. The Senate can similarly slow down the government, not only by impeding the progress of legislation but also by putting the brakes on executive appointments, and can also shut down the government. The tools may not be as precise as would be ideal for the theoretical task at hand, but Congress is anything but powerless.

The fact that I'm not particularly impressed with Marcus's arguments should not be interpreted as my supporting the idea of the executive forming policy through executive orders on matters that are best addressed through legislation. My concern is less about the slippery slope -- a form of argument that can be applied to any action, no matter how trivial -- and is much more about what happens when Congress won't or can't perform its duties. Unlike Marcus or the various members of her employer's editorial board, I find the issue of greater concern to be the fact that we are involved in a new war in the Middle East predicated upon an authorization that cannot reasonably be said to apply to the present circumstances, yet Congress is content to let the war wage on while refusing to pass a new authorization bill that could define its goals or limit its scope. There's not even a hint of concern from the editorial board that we should have congressional authorization for war before we get into yet another armed conflict in the Middle East.

The Washington Post editorial board wants the President to commit ground forces, in the form of special forces, to the front lines of the war with ISIS. It is chomping at the bit for the President to declare direct war on what remains of the Assad regime, without any apparent concern for what would follow the collapse of that regime. But one thing about which the editorial board is conspicuously unconcerned? The absence of Congressional authorization for the present war, let alone the escalated, potentially disastrous war that they propose.

To put it mildly, I'm not thrilled that the President is proposing unilateral action in the face of congressional gridlock. It would be better if Congress would do its job. But at least in the context of executive orders we're speaking not of Marcus's slippery slope, but of the President's following precedents set by prior administrations, and proposing lawful orders that are consistent with existing law. When it comes to war, the Constitution attempts to create a clear framework for the separation of powers, with wars to be initiated by Congress. If you're going to pretend concern about a possible constitutional crisis, can't you give that one more than a shrug and a yawn?

Jennifer Rubin Finds a Mirror

Jennifer Rubin, who people say is smart but who nonetheless rattles off a predictable set of talking points and often makes hare-brained assertions, comments on Ted Cruz,

Smarts don’t always equate to common sense. In the case of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), there is an inverse relationship between the two. I’m told by smart lawyers that he has a sharp legal mind, can think on his feet and has remarkable recall for facts, cases and even page numbers of the briefs. But his political judgment has become distorted by ambition.

Hm...

Her illustration of Cruz's 'smarts' reminds me of an anecdote about a lawyer who was similarly famed for his ability to provide pinpoint citations, on his feet, in court. Somebody asked him, eventually, how he managed to recall cases and even page numbers with such specificity. "I make them up. Nobody ever checks." But with a bit less cynicism, having a good memory - even an eidetic memory - is proof of good memory, not intelligence. Cruz may well be as smart as some people say, or he may be smart in the same sense that Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan are touted as intellectual giants among their Republican peers. When the pond is that shallow, you don't need to be a particularly big fish to stand out - and sometimes all it takes is for you to be the one people see because it's sticking its head out of the pond with its mouth constantly open. I'm also reminded of a certain trial lawyer who once ran for President, who strikes me as having been deemed a great trial lawyer by virtue of having a well-rehearsed presentation of a particular type of big money case, and who retired into politics when that particular line of litigation dried up. Or a certain TV host who brags about her conviction rate for homicide prosecutions, never mind that homicide cases are often open-and-shut with defendants going to trial only because they have nothing to lose. You have to look beyond the surface to find out if somebody truly is as brilliant as he and his friends claim him to be.

Rubin notes that Cruz was spouting nonsense about how Mitt Romney was the greatest guy in the world before he lost, at which point she contradicted her prior claims about him and denounced his deep flaws without appearing to notice the contradiction. No, wait, that was Rubin. She notes that Cruz is pretending that the President might sign a bill defunding the PPACA/Obamacare, and purporting that the public won't blame the Republicans if they shut down the government.

Well, maybe he understands something else. Perhaps he is as smart as his admirers claim and he is wildly ambitious, hoping to draw attention and fundraising dollars for his windmill-tilting scam. Later in the CNN interview he made it clear he was playing to the base on this one... And who better to pull the tsunami to shore than Cruz, right? Send money! Come to his events! Become outraged when the “unprincipled” Republicans won’t support him!

Read his blog! Oh, wait...

Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success. Alas, they confuse their own fame with achievement and divisiveness with progress.

And if that doesn't work out for him in politics, maybe Fred Hiatt can give him a job?

Rubin suggests that Cruz would be better off following the lead of Speaker Boehner, and "trying to put the monkey on the Democrats’ backs (as the speaker of the House is doing) in the Obamacare fight". Nobody has ever accused Boehner of being a genius, but perhaps Rubin should take note of the fact that pretty much every aspect of Obamacare is popular, save for the mandate which is a necessary part of the popular provision that requires insurance companies to provide coverage without respect to preexisting conditions. Pushing a fantasy about defunding Obamacare is probably more sensible than crossing your fingers and hoping that the mandate proves so unpopular that people are willing to throw the baby out with a few inches of bathwater.

A political loner and man of rhetoric, not of action or achievement, he bears a striking resemblance to the current Oval Office resident. Each considers himself the smartest man in any room (inducing annoyance and resentment among his party members) and each fails to understand rhetoric is not effective governance.

Projection, much? Seriously, how many people other than Rubin look at Cruz and say, "Wow, he's just like President Obama"? This would be one of those "predictable talking points and hare-brained assertions" to which I previously alluded.

If I read more of Rubin's pontifications, I might know who she is pushing as the next Republican presidential nominee. Perhaps somebody who, unlike Mitt Romney, doesn't see himself as God's gift to the country and the smartest man in the room, who scurries away from his own record whenever it becomes politically inconvenient? Because Rubin doesn't seem to like those characteristics in candidates she doesn't support....

American Grandstand, Feauring Rand Paul

Had Rand Paul been President on September 11, 2001, he would have fired somebody... other than himself.

We spent trillions of dollars, but there were a lot of human errors, these are judgment errors, and the people who make judgment errors need to be replaced, fired, and no longer in a position of making these judgment calls."

He's apparently in a tizzy that the Secretary of State doesn't personally review and evaluate each and every one of the 1.4 million or so cables received by the State Department.

I don't believe for a second that, had he been a Senator back in 2001, Rand Paul would not have fallen right into line, circling the wagons around Bush and Rice just like every other Republican. In start contrast with Condoleezza Rice's dismissal of responsibility by her and Bush, the "historic document" excuse, Clinton has been receptive of criticism of the State Department and of how security issues might be improved. Rand Paul-style grandstanding, basically trying to score cheap political points by attacking somebody whose last name is "Clinton", obscures the actual work to be done and makes even valid criticism look partisan.

"How Are You Going to Pay for This?"

Once the current "debt ceiling" pseudo-crisis has passed, assuming he is not able to achieve a resolution that takes the debt ceiling out of the picture indefinitely, why wouldn't the President be able to ask, in response to any new spending or budget, "How are you going to pay for this?" If the answer is "spending cuts", the President can ask that they be included in the bill. If there is no answer, the President can reply, "Then as part of this bill you need to either find a way to pay for your spending, or you need to increase the debt ceiling to cover the debt that the nation will incur as a result of this spending."

The Republicans could attempt some blackmail or brinksmanship, "We absolutely refuse to fund this bill, that is essential to our national defense", but I'm not seeing how they would be helped by taking such a position. If the President agrees that the matter is so essential that the spending must be approved despite its creating a debt ceiling issue, the President can make a clear statement about what's happening (call it "public shaming") and the Republicans will should pretty foolish if they later refuse to increase the debt ceiling to pay for the spending they deemed essential.

Jennifer Rubin's 'Best' Isn't Good Enough

In what some might see as an attempt to defy a popular definition of insanity, I saw a link to Jennifer Rubin's comment, "How to Win the Debt Ceiling Fight" and decided to see if she actually had something useful to say.

Republicans are struggling to devise a formula that simultaneously holds the president’s feet to the fire and yet escapes the charge that the GOP is playing Russian roulette with the country’s credit rating. As a practical matter I simply don’t think Republicans have the fortitude to hit the debt ceiling. To avoid the inevitable march-up-the-hill-down-the-hill routine there are two strategies (probably more) readily available.

That is to say, without actually explaining what a victory would look like, Rubin perceives two potential "winning strategies" for the Republicans. The first?

First, following the lead of Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2011, Republicans could pass legislation explicitly prohibiting default on our obligations and spelling out a sequence for paying our bills so that we don’t default on bond holders, stop Social Security checks or stiff the troops. However, this still might require shutting down other parts of the government, which the GOP has shown no stomach to do.

Should somebody point out to Ms. Rubin that if she admits, at the outset, that the Republicans have "no stomach" to implement her first idea, there's no point in pretending it's serious? Note, Rubin's objection is that the Republicans have no follow-through. She ignores the logistical issues: if she knows of a way the House of Representatives can "pass legislation" that becomes law despite being rejected by the Senate and President, I would love to hear about it....

At the heart of Leahy's proposal is, I suspect, a recognition of how much power Congress delegates to the President when it forces a government shut-down. The idea would presumably be to structure the shut-down to damage Democratic interests while protecting Republican interests over a period of months while the government is unable to pay its bills. The problem thus goes well beyond "stomach", and into the territory of naked partisanship. The Republican Party would have to show its hand - to let the public know exactly what the price would be for its brinksmanship, and how much worse things would get over the ensuing weeks and months until default became inevitable. And... then what?

When the blackmail is explicit, the President will be able to point directly at the blackmail - "They say that if I don't agree to budget cuts that they won't identify, they're going to keep me from paying your Social Security retirement benefits>". What would be the Republican response to that? Would they develop the "stomach" to identify the cuts that they want? Rubin doesn't think so. So the President's response can be, "You control the purse strings - pass a bill enumerating the cuts you want in order to get us out of this catastrophe you've created," and the Republicans have to choose between looking like (malicious) fools, identifying the cuts, or folding. Even Rubin can see the folly of that approach.

What's Rubin's other idea?

The other approach, the smartest I have seen so far, comes from Keith Hennessey, who explains that Republican leaders begin by “assuring [the president] that we will not allow the government to default on its obligations. The debt limit will be increased. The questions we must resolve are first, whether we will simultaneously cut government spending and second, who will cast the votes for the debt increase.” The Democrats then have a choice: either agree to significant entitlement reform in conjunction with a debt increase to get Obama through at least 2014 or the House Republicans will ”deliver 50 Republican votes for a three-month clean extension.

Basically, the Republicans will say, "We're up against the debt ceiling and we want you to make cuts." The President will reply, "What cuts would you like to make?" The Republicans will once again come up with nothing (as Rubin says, "no stomach"). The President will reply, "If you don't want to cut the budget, then you are going to need to approve the spending you've already authorized." The Republicans will then pass a debt ceiling increase approving that spending.

That is the smartest Republican strategy Rubin has seen? She provide's Hennessey's rationale,

[T]his strategy would tell the President, “Hey, if you want your terrible policy, you’re going to have to deliver House Democratic votes for it. Good luck with that.” Either the President accepts and Republicans pound on the “Democratic debt limit increase” message every three months, or he agrees to cut spending. Either way, default risk is eliminated. Republicans will look responsible because they will be acting responsibly, and the markets couldn’t care less about which Members take political heat for casting these unpopular votes.

So every three months the Republicans will say, "Cut spending or we'll raise the debt ceiling," the President will reply, "If you're going to raise the debt ceiling anyway... but, okay, I'll humor you, what cuts do you want me to consider?" The Republicans will reply, as usual, with "We got nothing." Then the public will get mad at the Democrats because the debt ceiling goes up? And it's "lather, rinse, repeat every three months for the next four years"?

Wow.

Not content to simply look foolish, Rubin has to embellish Hennessey's proposal with some terrible advice for her party:

I would add that under no circumstances should the negotiations (if the president chooses to entertain real entitlement reform) be in secret and/or between Republican leaders and the president. It’s time for regular business, with all lawmakers forced to cast votes. Shifting the focus away from the White House is hugely important in avoiding a (losing ) PR battle with the president and might actually deliver results.

Except this Republican grandstanding only works when they pretend it's the Republican Congress against an all-powerful President. If you reduce the role of the President, you make it obvious that Congress controls the proverbial purse strings - that the debt ceiling sideshow is irrelevant, and that the fundamental problem is that the Republicans in Congress keep authorizing the spending that necessitates government debt. You allow the President to point to the public, bipartisan negotiations and say, "When they come up with solutions, I'll be happy to review their budget reform bill, but for now they are running up the bills and it's my job to pay them." And then, per Rubin's proposal, the Republicans will raise the debt ceiling without condition. It's as if she wants her party to appear toothless.

A final word of advice: The Republicans should turn the president’s favorite class warfare game against him. He is the one defending Warren Buffett’s right to receive Social Security and free ride on Medicare; Republicans want to force rich people to pay more and get less so middle- and lower-income people have their benefits. Republicans may shy away from such arguments but unless the GOP captures the “fairness” argument and becomes the champion of the little guy, it will keep losing support and forever be outfoxed by the White House.

I am not sure that Rubin is going to convince more than a tiny handful of dimwitted people that somebody who pays FICA at the maximum rate for most of his career, and continues to do so well past retirement age, is getting a "free ride". If it needs to be explained, if you pay for insurance you are entitled to receive the coverage that you have paid for, even if you're rich - and Buffett, at age 82, is still paying into the system. Further, despite Rubin's eagerness to engage in what her party decries as "class warfare", even if you disqualify the top 1% from eligibility for Social Security and Medicare you will not materially affect the balance sheet.

Rubin apparently hopes that this form of Republican class warfare will confuse people. "We could cut Medicare spending by 1% if the richest 1% of the population were declared ineligible for Medicare. We, the Republican Party, don't think that's fair and to show that we stand for 'the little guy' we propose cutting everybody's Social Security and Medicare benefits."

Rubin's good at pouring out the snake oil, but if she wants people to actually buy it the trick is to confuse people into thinking they're getting something other than snake oil.

Safety in Numbers

Although a growing number of Republicans are willing to refuse to sign Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge, or repudiate their signatures, the party may be reaching a tipping point where they "toss[] aside Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge in order to secure a grand bargain". Norquist has played word games in the past to avoid accusing the Republicans of breaking their pledges, but if you push that type of game far enough you undermine the meaning of the pledge. On the other hand, if you accuse large numbers of Republicans of violating the pledge you are likely to find that they have the collective power to push back, "We have to do what's right for the country," and the legislators would likely have little concern about any effort to punish them - any effort at retaliation would become diluted.

You have to wonder, even if they agree with him in principle, whether a good number of the Republicans who have signed the pledge want to get out from under Norquist's thumb. Once the pledge is broken, it's not clear that Norquist or any similar pledge effort can regain the same level of power or control.

We Cannot Expect Republican Support for Carbon Taxes

On several recent occasions I've heard conservative talking heads make comments along the line of, "Global warming is real, the science supports it, but it's too late to do anything about it." Meanwhile, the global reality is that if it's a fraction of a penny cheaper to extract fossil fuels from the ground and burn them as compared to deriving energy from any other source, it's pretty clear that somebody is going to dig up or extract the fossil fuel and burn it.

Jamelle Bouie argues that conservatives should support (or is it "get back to supporting") some sort of tax on carbon emissions.

With a carbon tax off the table, new regulatory action becomes inevitable, with greater government intervention in the economy. This isn’t a hypothetical; when new taxes or direct spending is blocked as a means of implementing policy, the result is almost always a confusing, expensive and inefficient patchwork of regulations, mandates, and tax expenditures (see: the Affordable Care Act).

If conservatives believe that they can prevent any action on climate change indefinitely, then they should continue their opposition to a carbon tax or any other market-based mechanism for dealing with emissions. But if they have the slightest doubts, they would do well to open themselves to the possibility. All things being equal, it’s much better to conservative interests for the government to implement a tax and walk away, rather than develop a new scheme for regulation.

To which the "reasonable" people to whom I've previously alluded will argue that there's no point in a unilateral approach to climate change - if you can't bring China, India and the rest of the world along, the impact of unilateral action is modest. And as was suggested by the Republican approach to these issues during the primaries and presidential campaign, any regulatory approach is going to be derided as harming domestic oil production and driving up the cost of gas and heating oil to the detriment of U.S. consumers.

One of my frustrations with the debates is that both candidates were at times willing to adopt a narrative they knew to be misleading, not only because they stood to gain politically but also because the narrative is consistent with the beliefs of the voters they were hoping to reach. There are some issues for which pushing back against your opponent's false or misleading statement can hurt you politically.

The example that Bouie's argument brings to mind is the price of gas. Romney, who has to know better, was arguing that the President has some sort of magical control of gas prices. As if there's a valve hidden under his desk in the Oval Office that controls the nation's supply of gasoline. As if gas prices aren't affected by refinery capacity. As if increased domestic oil production will result in a sudden drop in the price of gasoline, even if the production has no meaningful impact on world supply or the price of oil in the global market. As if the difference between the price of gasoline on the date the financial crisis bottomed out and the price today is reflective of the White House energy policy instead of the laws of supply and demand.

Why not lecture Romney that he knows how commodity pricing works, and he knows that his argument is insipid? I suspect it's because polling and focus group testing suggests that it's not what people want to hear. Just like people don't want to hear that the President doesn't have granular control over the unemployment rate - as if a president in a recession who is looking at 8%+ unemployment would decide, coming into an election, "I think I'll keep unemployment high." People just don't want to know. And alas, politicians benefit by keeping the mythology alive.

Tying Medicare Reform Into Obamacare

Robert Kuttner comments on Medicare reform proposals:

The White House, however, has dropped hints that Medicare could come in for cuts, specifically an increase in the eligibility age. This is a really bad idea. The administration has already imagined that it will be able to cut Medicare by nearly a trillion dollars without cutting services, in order to finance Obamacare. Republicans railed against these cuts in the campaign. Any further Medicare cuts are a terrible idea.

Long-term reform of Medicare is necessary, and is a daunting project. But it doesn’t belong in this budget deal.

I agree with Kuttner that, as things presently stand, increasing the eligibility age for Medicare is likely to prove to be bad policy. A lot of people hold off on obtaining medical care until they qualify for Medicare, and making people wait a few years longer is likely to both increase the number of people who have unmet medical needs as they enter Medicare and the cost of treating some of those illnesses and disorders. It's not clear that the government would end up saving any money, or at least not an appreciable amount.

Looking at political reality, though, you're going to see any "increase in age" legislated in the same manner as the Romney-Ryan voucherization plan - it will be something that affects a class of future retirees, not those who are presently at or near retirement age. That means first that the change is likely to be scheduled to take effect under a different President, but also that Congress will be staring down the next set of people who are near retirement age when they actually implement the change.

So, how about that "Obamacare" thing?

Let's say that the future deal is that the age for eligibility in Medicare is bumped up by three years. Not so good for unhealthy near-retirees, right? Except if things work out as planned, those near-retirees will have health insurance - likely with companies that would just as soon dump them onto Medicare. If the eligibility age is increased but that class of seniors is permitted to buy into Medicare, those who would presently be left high and dry by a raising of the eligibility age may be able to obtain Medicare courtesy of the subsidies made available through "Obamacare". If the trade is "We'll raise the Medicare eligibility age by three years, starting in [the future], as long as affected seniors can buy into Medicare," most seniors should be reasonably covered through that transition period.

There's also an element of "put up or shut up" involved for the Republicans. If the private markets can compete with Medicare, providing the same or better service at a cost savings to enrollees, then insurance companies should be lining up to serve near-retirees during the years leading up to their Medicare eligibility. If that in fact happens, great! If the Republicans are afraid to go there... well, what does that tell you?

If You Want a Balanced Budget....

At a bare minimum, you need to vote for politicians who are serious about balancing the budget. How do you know if balancing the budget is a priority to a politician? Ask him to produce his plan. A weak plan might sound like "We'll cut spending, and raise taxes if we have to." A stronger plan would identify some, most or all of the spending cuts and tax increases necessary to balance the budget. And if you hear something like this,

First, we cut taxes....

You can pretty much take for granted that you're being played for a fool. If the rest of the plan never gets more specific than "tax reform", "cut funding for PBS", and the like, but you choose to believe that the politician at issue is serious about balancing the budget, it's all on you. And if you hear that politician add, "The budget will be balanced in ten years," that is, two years into the next President's term, he's not actually promising to balance the budget.

At The American Conservative, Jordan Bloom expresses desire for a balanced budget amendment - and he's so eager to get it that he proposes what he describes as a "nuclear option", an Article V constitutional convention - to get one. I've commented on balanced budget amendments before - most of them... actually , all the examples I've seen... are weak, politically driven, full of loopholes.... The most sensible comment I've heard on the matter remains that of Warren Buffett - if you want a balanced budget, pass a law that sets a maximum threshold for a deficit and then bar any Member of Congress who votes for spending above that threshold from being reelected. Problem solved.

If you include loopholes in your balanced budget amendment, they will be exploited to the point that the amendment becomes meaningless and can be expected to distort the budgetary process. If you don't include loopholes, you tie the government's hands when deficit spending is necessary, you encourage the sort of budgetary shenanigans you see in state to pretend that a budget is balanced, such as balancing the current budget by shifting the debt into future budgets, and creating a context in which budgetary disputes could end up being litigated - do you seriously want a single federal judge to review and potentially revise the federal budget? Even if it were practically feasible, and could be completed in a timely manner, judicial review would intrude upon what is intended to be a legislative process. You could also inspire the government to expand the money supply - to balance the budget through tools that would trigger inflation.

Proponents of a balanced budget amendment often embrace the notion that the federal government's budget is analogous to a household budget, and that you should not spend more than you "earn". Lots of problems with that... not the least of which are that taxes are not analogous to income, there are times at which running a deficit can be necessary and others when it's good policy (ideally the two will mostly overlap), and the big picture is clouded by the deficit nobody likes to talk about - the trade deficit.

In the biggest picture sense, the concept that you cannot deficit spend forever - that you cannot indefinitely expand the debt burden at a rate that exceeds inflation, has merit. Yes, it would make sense for the government to work on the long-term fiscal health of the nation when the economy is robust, not to spend irresponsibly - or cut taxes irresponsibly - when they have the opportunity to move the budget toward balance or keep it there.

There are two main objections to the plan. The first is that one can never be quite sure what’s going to come out of a constitutional convention. The second is that a balanced budget amendment would probably mean in the near-term rapid austerity and arbitrary spending cuts. You know, like the fiscal cliff–a net deficit ameliorant–but bigger.

On the first front, not only could you end up with a constitution that's unrecognizable by historic measures, it might not even include a balanced budget amendment. On the second front, Bloom basically concedes the policy argument - a balanced budget amendment could put us into a cycle of a worsening recession followed by tax cuts necessary to counterbalance reduced government revenues and the right-wing horror story becomes reality - we become Greece.

It’s worth pointing out that had Romney won last night, this option would likely be closed – conservatives would be expected to believe that he would work to restore fiscal discipline (while increasing spending on wars and “preserving” Medicare).

Romney talked about balancing the budget, his actual promises did not encompass much more than cutting taxes (and PBS). If you believe his confused comments at the debates, the tax cuts were going to somehow be revenue-neutral, but he was unwilling to offer specifics. I do believe that he would have delivered his tax cuts, just as G.W. delivered the cuts he promised, as that's what his financial backers wanted him to do. The rest? Snake oil.

The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.

The Conservative Vote for Romney - Reluctant at Best?

One of the aspects of the Republican Party that I find interesting is that it is deemed the "conservative" party. That, I suppose, is because it is devoted to cutting taxes for the wealthy and gives sufficient lip service to various lines of conservative thought to keep the votes rolling in. But other than the tax cuts, it's history of governance isn't what I would call "conservative".

At the Volokh Conpsiracy, (libertarian) David Post summarized his views on the candidates, and was in some senses easier on both of them than I would have been. He gives "Obama maybe a B or B+", noting that Obama inherited a "global economic meltdown" from which we're recovering, adding, "For some reason I cannot even fathom, many otherwise reasonable people seem to regard this as a terrible failure on Obama’s part."

Mitt Romney? "The guy’s as light a lightweight as I can imagine – he makes Bush look like Schopenhauer. "The guy’s as light a lightweight as I can imagine – he makes Bush look like Schopenhauer." Post is concerned that he has no sense of how Mitt Romney would respond in a crisis situation, but his impression is that "reacts the way Bush reacted when something he couldn’t imagine happening actually happened... and it’s not a comforting thought".

My personal thought is that if the Republican Party were able to nominate a centrist, pragmatic, fact- and issue-driven businessperson, this election wouldn't be much of a contest. That type of candidate, I think, could pull in 60% of the vote. But thanks to the nomination process, the need to pander to certain elements of the base to get a shot at the White House, that's not going to happen. It's difficult to get somebody better than a G.W. Bush, and frankly now that the Tea Party Movement has recognized the power of the primary it may be difficult to do better than a Romney - somebody who seems to hold no core values or beliefs, and will say and do anything to advance his own self-interest.

Had Romney articulated the positions associated with his latest self-reinvention, the centrism he outlined during the debates (more or less "I'll do exactly what Obama's doing, but better - and I'll cut taxes") it's unlikley that he would have been any more successful than Huntsman - a guy who made the mistake of taking actual positions early in the primary process, and thus ended up being one of the first guys shoved out of the clown car. When you consider that the last three men standing were Romney, Santorum and Gingrich... wow. But Romney can attest that if you survive the nomination process, even if you willingly surrender your soul to achieve that goal, it's enough for most of the base to simply not be the other guy.

There's an interesting assortment of takes on "how I'm going to vote" from various flavors of libertarian and conservative at The American Conservative. Some of the comments are insightful, some are odd or shallow, some are witty, others serious, and some mix and match, offering an insight in one sentence and a head scratcher in the next. Sometimes you get to the end of the comment, read the author's claim to fame, and... "now it makes sense" - not necessarily the reasoning, but why the author is taking that particular view. For example, "Within 30 years, the U.S. will be majority non-white and will cease to exist as we’ve known it," came from a VDARE.com editor, and the snark, "on the economy, unemployment is too high, growth is too slow, and Barack Obama is too 'green'" came from a Fox News contributor. There's a lot of hand-wringing about, of all things, feminism and yes, the absolute horror that churches be required to offer birth control to employees of their secular operations. Okay, I can't resist taking a shot at this one:

For me, there’s never even been a possibility of voting for Obama. The Democratic Party history is one immersed in slaughter: removal and abuse of the American Indians, the desire for a national police force to return escaped slaves, and the concentration of loyal Americans of Japanese descent into camps.

Obama has embraced this wretched tradition. Indeed, no president has overseen a loss of civil liberties more dramatically than the current one since Franklin Roosevelt disgraced the once august executive office. Not only did Obama fail to close Gitmo and reverse Bush’s policies promoting “national security,” he’s not-so-slowly Gitmoizing the entire United States. As the great Robert Higgs has argued, if you don’t believe we are living in a police state, you must be blind.

Yes, it's all one unbroken history, with Obama being the worst president since FDR due to his failure to overturn the atrocious policies put into place by... George W. Bush... and due to his adherence to the Constitution when Congress - with overwhelming Republican opposition to Obama's plan - refused to fund the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Let's all sing along, "Don't know much about history...."

What's interesting is how many are unwilling to vote for Romney, declaring that they'll either abstain from voting or support a third party candidate. More than a few prefer Obama.

It's easy to get discouraged with our system and its two parties - it's difficult not to feel taken for granted, to not feel like you're choosing the lesser of two evils. I don't know what a Romney victory would mean for the Republican Party, although it's difficult to imagine that it would lead to the party being more conservative. Many of the authors on the American Conservative website are concerned that Romney is ignorant of foreign policy and that his advisers will push him to involve the nation in new, large-scale military conflicts. If anything weighs against that possibility, it would be that Romney appears to be exceptionally risk-averse. It's difficult for me to imagine that he would push the country toward war, unless the polls were telling him that the nation was eager to go there. On the other hand, given how spineless he has proved to be on economic issues, it's easy for me to imagine his pushing through his proposed tax cuts with an associated explosion of debt (but recall: he's not going to balance the budget for a decade, so he takes no responsibility for either the starting or ending points of his economic "reforms").

What bothers me most about Romney it not his foreign policy ignorance. It's how freely and easily he lies. How it doesn't even seem to bother him to dramatically change his message, his supposed core values, from day to day, from audience to audience. To the extent that his quest for self-advancement is likely to lead him down a path he believes will get him reelected, it's still difficult to take comfort in the notion that his cautiousness and focus on his own popularity might moderate his agenda. From an economic standpoint the path of least resistance is apt to look like Bush's first term. I agree with those who see the most likely lesson of a Romney victory as being "You can brazenly lie your way all the way into the White House," and I would prefer that the lesson be, "You can fudge the truth, as politicians do, you can spin, you can demagogue, but there's a point at which your deceit disqualifies you from elected office."

David Brooks Rejects Moderation - Anything to Get a Tax Cut

David Brooks pens a predictably partisan "analysis" of how Mitt Romney would supposedly govern as a "center-right moderate". Not in the sense of Brooks' recent definition of "moderate", but in the sense of the guy who stakes out a position between two extremes and calls himself a "moderate".

Now let’s try to imagine the world if Mitt Romney were to win. Republicans would begin with the premise that the status quo is unsustainable. The mounting debt is ruinous. The byzantine tax and regulatory regimes are stifling innovation and growth.

Brooks told us that a moderate is informed not by politics or philosophy, but by history. What does history tell us about Republicans and deficits? It tells us that they campaign against deficits and then, once elected, run up deficit spending to unprecedented heights. Brooks may want to believe that "this time will be different", but that can only be because his eyes are clouded by his own wishful thinking and political partisanship.

Brooks is also not being honest with his readers. He pretends, "", but he knows that's a lie. He knows that a lot of government regulation that stifles innovation was created and is maintained at the behest of businesses that don't want competition. He knows that the tax code is complex, byzantine, not because it's necessary to include that level of complexity, but because a simple tax code makes it difficult for large corporations and phenomenally wealthy individuals (such as Mitt Romney) to avoid taxes. Brooks knows that Romney made his fortune by exploiting tax loopholes, by larding up businesses with debt and deducting the interest

Dos Brooks truly believe that Romney is going to take away the loopholes that allowed him to get $100 million into his IRA? That he's going to do away with carried interest, the loophole that allowed him to have his massive income taxes as capital gains? That he's going to shut down the loopholes that make private equity funds so profitable? Not in this lifetime. You need only look at who is funding Romney's run for the White House to know that there's a zero percent chance he's going to do any of that.

Does Brooks believe that Romney is terrified of disclosing his tax returns because they'll disclose his scrupulous, honest nature, his self-sacrifice, his interest in closing tax loopholes? Only if he's on crack. Most likely, Romney is concealing the fact that he took advantage of the tax amnesty on dubious offshore bank accounts - an important tool in tax avoidance and one that Romney has made no mention of eliminating.

Which tax loopholes is Romney going to close? He refuses to specify - and of the ones he's mentioned in the abstract they all inure to the benefit of the middle class. Which government spending is Romney going to cut? He mentioned PBS - but history tells us that he won't cut PBS (even if such a cut mattered in the greater scheme of things). He has talked about cutting or privatizing FEMA. I suspect that, as I type, Brooks can look out of his window and get a sense of how likely that is to happen. Seriously.

What history indicates is that Romney will follow the path of George W. Bush. He ran on a promise to cut taxes, those who paid for his campaign are going to want him to deliver on those tax cuts, and he will do so without regard for the deficit or national debt. To the extent that people remind him of his pledge to cut spending to offset the tax cuts, history says he'll talk about growth and cuts to occur in the future - it's a ten year plan, remember? And history tells us that ten years later when, just as with G.W.'s tax cuts, the Romney plan turns out to be bunkum and to have put the nation into an even deeper fiscal hole, you can expect David Brooks to be telling us to vote for the next Republican because "he's going to govern from the center-right and this time he really will balance the budget."

Republicans would like to take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform.

You'll excuse me for asking, but how many Republican governors are there in the state of Indiana? Last I checked, Indiana followed the crazy model of only having one governor at a time. And what is the gist of Indiana's tax reform? To limit property taxes and overcome the loss of revenue by increasing the state sales tax? How in the world does Brooks propose to translate that type of reform to the federal government? Does Brooks even understand how taxes work? And other than jumping on the money-losing "drug testing for welfare recipients" bandwagon, what "structural entitlement reform" are we talking about?

I recognize that as a Republican partisan Brooks is happy to pretend that conclusory statements and platitudes constitute policy proposals, and is happy to suggest that "We'll balance the budget by doing things we're not going to tell you about" is an actual plan to balance the budget, but get real.

These reforms wouldn’t make government unrecognizable (we’d probably end up spending 21 percent of G.D.P. in Washington instead of about 24 percent), but they do represent a substantial shift to the right.

Recall how, when pressed for specifics about his tax reforms, he announced that his solution was to just "pick a number" - an entirely random number?

And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets -- I'll pick a number -- $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.

That's not even close to serious. On top of that, Romney is promising massive increases in military spending. History tells us that when Republicans promise to cut taxes, they cut taxes. When they promise to increase spending, they increase spending. And when they promise to balance the budget... it never happens. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Romney will reduce government spending. He may shift it around, he may make life even easier and more lucrative for those at the top, but cut it? Sorry, David, those were numbers, not beams of sunshine, that Romney pulled out of his posterior.

At the same time, Romney would probably be faced with a Democratic Senate. He would also observe the core lesson of this campaign: conservatism loses; moderation wins.

But if Romney wins, that won't be the lesson of the campaign. The lesson will be that you can lie your way into the White House, all the while being enabled by columnists like David Brooks, because you promise an agenda that they like - one that keeps them and their peers, and the even richer elite they so admire, in their positions of wealth and privilege. You'll note that Brooks isn't pointing to anything Romney has said or done to paint his portrait of what's likely to happen, and he's intentionally ignoring history. Why? Because honesty loses elections, and Brooks wants Romney to win.

Only a few days ago Brooks was lecturing us that "Moderates start with a political vision" derived from history and "is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there". Yet now we're suddenly to regard as "moderate" a "center-right" Mitt Romney who gets legislation through the Senate by staking out a position between the Republicans in the House and the Democrats in the Senate and asking, "Is this a good enough way to split the baby?"

This is funny, as well - and false:

Romney’s prospects began to look decent only when he shifted to the center.

This election has been close from the outset. While Romney did dip in the polls after the Republican National Convention, his subsequent "bounce" has been much more a return to the baseline than anything else. And yes, his latest reinvention of what he believes and what he stands for seems to have helped him move back to the status quo ante, I think it's much more fair to say that his demagoguery, his race-baiting surrogates like John Sununu, and his exploitation of the financial crisis and mendacity about the recovery have helped him build what is in no small part an anti-Obama vote. He can't win as Mitt Romney, so he's running as "But I'm not Barack Obama". To the extent that people believe Romney stands for something, it's wishful thinking - "For no good reason, I'm sure Romney agrees with me on issue X, and that the dozens of other positions he's taken on the subject were all self-serving lies." A Romney victory would be a sad indictment of our political system, and frankly also of how it is covered by people like David Brooks.

A President Romney would look at the way Tea Party extremism had cost the G.O.P. Senate seats in Delaware and Nevada — and possibly Missouri and Indiana.

Even before his latest reinvention of himself, candidate Romney was aware of the dangers of being too closely identified with the Tea Party movement. But again, Brooks is forgetting his history. The Tea Party movement isn't a new thing - on the whole it's little more than a new name for a faction of the Republican Party that has been around for decades. Republican presidents have a long history of making broad promises to that faction, while being pretty modest about advancing that type of ideology when in office. Why? Because, as Brooks knows, the presidency is a national office. While Romney may represent a new extreme in how far a party nominee may go in pandering to an extremist element when seeking the nomination, then adopting a contradictory agenda when running for office, the rest is par for the course.

Brooks fails to mention that the danger the Tea Party poses to the Republican Party comes not at the level of the White House, but at the level of the primary. In states that have a significant Tea Party movement, candidates like Rick Santorum seem viable. Even long-term senators like John McCain start trembling in their shoes at the thought of a Tea Party-driven primary challenge. An honest Brooks would acknowledge that the newly center-right Romney may well be able to peel off some Democrats to support his agenda, but if he strays too far from the Tea Party line he's apt to lose as many Republicans, perhaps more. That could be paralyzing for any "moderate" or "centrist" agenda.

You know what else? Whether they win or lose in certain state races, the Tea Party has never been closer to having its agenda implemented by the Republican Party. There's no reason to believe they're going to back off.

To get re-elected in a country with a rising minority population and a shrinking Republican coalition, Romney’s shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate.

"Romney’s shape-shifting nature".... What a description. It's the description of a man with no core, a man with no backbone, and yet Brooks seems excited at the prospect of his becoming President. Let's take another look at history, shall we? Twelve years ago we had a Republican President who was going to usher in immigration law reform - he saw the handwriting on the wall, and was going to build ties with the Latino community.

We had a prominent Senator who also favored immigration reform and championed the DREAM Act - one John McCain. Let's recall, shall we, how much the President accomplished toward immigration reform.... He made immigration more difficult. And what of that Senator? Eight years later he was running against the immigration policies he once championed, and as time has progressed he has moved further and further away from his former positions. He also used to champion campaign finance reform... fat chance that he or President Romney are going to get behind that idea.

Seriously, it's safe to say that a man like Romney - a man who appears to care for absolutely nothing but advancing his own interests - will govern in a manner he believes is likely to result in his being reelected. But history is instructive, and there's far less reason to believe that Romney wants immigration reform as compared to Bush, and there's no reason to believe that Romney will succeed where Bush failed. Beyond that, what does Brooks imagine Romney will do to appeal to "a country with a rising minority population"? Apologize for all of the race-baiting he and his surrogates have engaged in during his campaign?

To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises.

Brooks is, in essence, repeating himself. And we're back to this notion that the Republican Party is going to break with history and suddenly prioritize balancing the budget over cutting taxes for the rich. I mentioned the head count in my last post, 236 out of 242 Republican Members of Congress, and 40 out of 47 Republican Senators, have signed Grover Norquist's anti-tax pledge. The numbers may change slightly after the next election, but not significantly. Also, there is no reason to believe that Romney is going to decide that the best way to win reelection is to tell his largest donors, "You know what? Obama was right about taxes as well." Some degree of compromise may be required for him to get his tax cuts through a Democratic controlled Senate, but he will make it a priority to keep of that promise to his donors (and, frankly, to himself).

As for "the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget", Romney has already abandoned them. When it comes to how he'll balance the budget, he won't get more specific than cutting PBS. Romney and Ryan are both cowards - they have both failed to explain who would feel the bite from their proposed cuts. And while Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program, and Romney proposes to push forward with that idea, the cowards have pushed the implementation of that reform so far into the future that they'll be long out of office before anything changes. They are not serious about balancing the budget and as much as Brooks attempts to fool himself - or is it only others that he's trying to fool - they will not hesitate to run up the deficit and the national debt. And when they do so, they'll claim "It's all Obama's fault."

You gotta love this:

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform.

All of four days ago, Brooks was telling us about the difference between being "moderate" and being "bipartisan", in that column and at the start of this one Brooks told us that Romney's latest reinvention of himself involved advancing a "moderate and sensible agenda", and yet here he is, admitting that his favorite spineless pretzel of a politician is not advancing "moderation", but is embracing the shallowest form of "bipartisanship", "finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting [him]self there".

Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama.

Yes, Brooks sees that as a good thing - a basis for endorsement. "You can't trust a word out of his mouth and you'll never know what he stands for (other than himself), so vote Romney."

He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans.

You'll excuse me for asking, but what evidence can Brooks offer that Romney will have any influence over House Republicans?

He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

If by "big stuff" you mean "tax cuts for the rich", yep. If you mean addressing any of the nation's most serious problems, Romney is expressly campaigning on a platform of leaving the hard stuff for the next guy - even if he serves a full eight years. He'll start the country on the path to have the budget balanced... in ten years. He'll start the process of privatizing and voucherizing Medicare and the first people who get vouchers instead of insurance will receive them... in ten years.

Romney is a coward, and he'll govern as a coward. If that makes Brooks comfortable, I am hard pressed on that evidence to believe that Brooks cares about anything other than getting a tax cut.

David Brooks, Minstrel to Brave Sir Ryan

If only you could meet him, you would understand why people are awed. Instead you're doing silly things like looking at his words and actions? Absurd!

In relation to David Brooks' column endorsing the Republican voucher plan for Medicare, in which Brooks purports to be addressing "the paradigmatic 'moderate voter'", Scott Galupo notes, it’s bleedingly obvious that David Brooks is talking to himself"

There may be three- or four-hundred voters besides Brooks who suffer from the same perplexities. Maybe a dozen of these live somewhere besides Manhattan or Washington, D.C. The idea that any bloc of voters, let alone moderates, believes that the “priority in this election is to get a leader who can get Medicare costs under control” is ludicrously narcissistic.

Basically, the column is typical Brooks - some pretense at moderation before throwing his entire weight behind the Republican candidate. Facts? Irrelevant. Dean Baker observes,

NYT readers must be wondering whether David Brooks believes in Santa Claus. After all, he repeatedly professes his belief in the serious Mr. Ryan. This faith persists in spite of all the evidence to the opposite, including evidence that Brooks cites in arguing his case....

Since CBO works for Congress, it does what powerful members of Congress want it to do. Thus it wrote down down the numbers that Mr. Ryan instructed them to write down. However CBO was honest and clearly stated that it had just written down numbers given to it by Mr. Ryan and his staff. Unfortunately David Brooks is either too confused to understand what CBO wrote, or alternatively is deliberately trying to mislead NYT readers into believing that CBO scored a Ryan budget when it did not.

Brooks expects his readers to keep up with the Romney/Ryan game of "hide the ball", asserting (without evidence) that the Romney/Ryan privatization plan will bring about savings and efficiencies not seen in either the private insurance markets or through "Medicare Advantage" because... well, because he says so. Is it theoretically possible? Sure. But experience suggests that its unlikely to work.

This system would provide a basic health safety net. It would also unleash a process of discovery. If the current Medicare structure proves most efficient, then it would dominate the market. If private insurers proved more efficient, they would dominate. Either way, we would find the best way to control Medicare costs. Either way, the burden for paying for basic health care would fall on the government, not on older Americans. (Much of the Democratic criticism on this point is based on an earlier, obsolete version of the proposal.)

That, of course, is nonsense. The Romney/Ryan plan doesn't kick in for a couple of decades, so there's no experimentation - only assumption. If Romney and Ryan truly believed in their plan they would be asserting that it should be implemented immediately. That, right here, right now, private insurance companies should produce plans to complete with Medicare and demonstrate that they can offer superior, innovative plans at a lower cost.

Brooks predictably omits from mention the fact that the Romney/Ryan plan relies upon sleight of hand to "save" money - it caps the growth of the government's contribution toward your Medicare voucher. It's simply dishonest to pretend that the new plan would avoid shifting the burden of healthcare costs onto the elderly - Brooks knows better. That's the fundamental purpose of the proposal - to shift the risk that healthcare inflation will exceed the capped rate of growth for Medicare premiums from the government to the retired worker. If Brooks wants to make the case that the shift of risk is appropriate, he has the column in which to do it, but he has no excuse for misleading his readers about the fact that if Ryan truly believed his plan would bring about efficiencies he wouldn't need to cap premiums and shift the risk of loss to elderly individuals.

As if that's not enough, Brooks lies about the Democratic alternative to the Ryan Plan, which is to tackle healthcare inflation and waste as opposed to capping premium growth and calling it a day.

All of which causes you to look over to the Democrats and wonder: Why don’t they have an alternative? Silently, a voice in your head is pleading with them: Put up or shut up.

Certainly you can argue that the measures taken are inadequate, but the ACA is the first real effort to tackle the growth in Medicare spending. But you know what? The Republican party has demagogued against cost-saving measures. When it came to counseling the elderly on end of life issues, they spouted nonsense about "death panels". When it came to attempting to determine the cost-effectiveness of medical procedures in order to reduce unnecessary spending and waste, they demagogued about government bureaucrats deciding what medical treatment you would get. And when a number was placed on the projected savings from eliminating inefficiency they - including Mitt Romney and (brave Sir) Paul Ryan - demagogued about the Obama Administration's "raiding" Medicare.

Dean Baker noted something in Brooks' column that struck me as well,

There is one other issue worth beating up on Brooks for in this piece. At one point he says:

"I have enormous respect for Ryan and I regard most of the commentary I’ve read about him by people who’ve never even interviewed him to be ludicrous."

Huh? What planet is this guy on? It's wonderful that Brooks has had the opportunity to interview Paul Ryan. Most of us will not have that opportunity.

I suspect that's part of the back-and-forth between Paul Krugman and David Brooks, in which names are rarely mentioned. It's not that Paul Ryan couldn't pick up his phone and arrange to be interviewed by Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, or any other credible economist who takes issue with his fantasy "budget". It's that he doesn't want to. It's easy to see why Ryan will sit down and chat with somebody like David Brooks, who doesn't understand economics and who he knows will reward that access by supporting the Republican Party position in his columns. But it's just as easy to see why he won't sit down with anybody who would take him and his plan to pieces.

Even as Brooks sings his ballad of Brave Sir Ryan, the lyrics he sings give away the game. Ryan doesn't have the courage to face a worthy foe, or really anybody who is half-way conversant with the facts and willing to push him on the basics - such as why, after two years, can't he articulate the spending cuts necessary to make his "budget" work? Or why reforms supposedly essential to "saving" Medicare are pushed off twenty or so years into the future with no assurance that a future Congress will in fact pursue the plan? Bravest of the brave....

Michael Gerson Couldn't be More of a Hack if He Tried

And yet he keeps trying.

For the Obama campaign, this is not an aberration; it is a culmination. The demonization of Romney is a main element of its strategy, pursued by Obama’s closest associates and former employees, not by loosely affiliated partisan groups. Deniability is not even remotely plausible, but it doesn’t remotely matter. Even when exposed, the Obama campaign never retracts, never apologizes — convinced that the news cycle will quickly erase inconvenient memories.

This from the guy who used to sit adoringly at Karl Rove's knee? The Obama team can take some comfort here - you don't elicit crocodile tears that large unless the hack criticizing your campaign knows his side is losing.

But the most vivid accusation (made by a closely associated PAC and embraced by the campaign itself) is that Romney’s ruthless business practices were responsible for the closing of a firm, the loss of a couple’s health insurance and thus the death of a woman from cancer. Except that Romney wasn’t connected to the closing of the firm, the woman continued to have health insurance from another source and her cancer was diagnosed five years after the plant shut down.

Which represents the crossing of an ethical line. If the conduct of the Obama campaign team were universalized, candidates would no longer require any evidence to accuse one another of complicity in a death. To accept this as a new political norm would be to define defamation down.

Because, you know, saying that your opponent favors policies and engaged in business practices that cost working Americans their health insurance is exactly the same as accusing somebody of murder. Suggesting that somebody committed murder, on the other hand, is fair game - as long as the nonsense is directed at a Democrat...

I am admittedly a sucker for rhetorical idealism. But it can’t be a small thing, a typical thing, a trivial thing, to ask for belief and then betray it.

Yeah... like Gerson's "compassionate conservatism". Flushed down the memory hole.

How Dare the President Contradict Right-Wing Talking Points!

Michael Gerson is in full-scale stenographer mode today, serving up one right-wing talking point after another. Sometimes you have to wonder.... Leaving aside for the moment that Gerson is feigning apoplexy over the fact that the President is spinning the latest job numbers in, well, exactly the manner you would expect, some of Gerson's arguments are just plain absurd:

While the jobs number for June was bad, it was probably not bad enough to result in another round of quantitative easing when the Federal Reserve meets late this month. So Obama is left with a series of recycled State of the Union proposals — maintaining existing middle-class tax breaks, spending on infrastructure, funding some jobs for teachers — that no self-respecting Keynesian economist would judge sufficient.

In other words, as the President has no remedies he can administer without action by Congress, all he can do is urge Congress to act. Which it won't, because the House is controlled by Gerson's party and wants to harm the President's chance of being reelected. Gerson sputters that this means the President suffers from "ideological exhaustion" and "seems incapable of producing an economic agenda equal to his political challenge". Well, no, not if you look at the facts. It would be fair to say that the President, like most people, underestimated the severity of the recession and the probability for robust recovery when he took office, but for the past couple of years it has been the policy of the Republican Party to obstruct anything that might materially aid the recovery.

Gerson tells us the crucial question:

The relevant question: Has Obama accelerated or slowed the recovery?

And as Gerson knows, the overwhelming consensus is that, yes, Obama's policies, quantitative easing and stimulus spending have accelerated the recovery. So Gerson predictably resorts to a single fellow alumnus of the G.W. Bush Administration, a guy who consistently posts screeds against the Obama Administration, who says,

“Government, measured by federal spending, is this year about 15 percent bigger than the historical average, measured relative to the economy. . . . This drains resources from private firms and individuals and means slower productivity growth.”

You'll note first that this is a non sequitur. The quoted passage does not contradict the consensus view that Obama's policies have accelerated the recovery. Instead it's a canard - a conclusory statement that this year's public spending is causing reduced private investment. Never mind the facts. Corporations are floating on a sea of cash. When somebody purports that corporations have been drained of cash by the President's economic policies it raises that age-old question - fools or frauds?

Gerson carries on,

Obama’s major regulatory initiatives, particularly Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, have added to economic uncertainty. Businesses are waiting for the implications of these laws to become clear, and federal rules to be written, before making investment choices.

Okay... first lets look at "the Dodd-Frank financial reform". That reform became law on July 21, 2010. Why does Gerson believe that, almost two years later, businesses have not figured out what it requires? Now I'll grant, the Republicans have done everything they can to complicate its implementation, to hobble and delay the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and various lawsuits have been filed, but that's not the President's doing.

The "Obamacare" story is similar. The Republican Party did everything it could to obstruct the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act and, when unsuccessful, spent two years litigating the constitutionality of the ACA, culminating in its being upheld by the Supreme Court. The Republican Party has since encouraged Republican governors to be as obstructionist as possible when it comes to implementing the ACA.

In short, to the extent that confusion and uncertainty remain problems, it's not because of the President. It's because Gerson's own party has gone out of its way to create an unstable, uncertain environment. If Gerson believes that disqualifies his party from holding office, I see no reason to argue.

Gerson next resorts to platitudes, "the Obama administration has failed to make tough calls and secure legislative compromises on a variety of issues — the federal debt, future tax rates, the Keystone XL pipeline — that might remove sources of economic uncertainty". Gerson is apparently not familiar with separation of powers, and believes that the President is in fact a Prime Minister - able to introduce legislation and vote on it in the House of Representatives.

If Gerson double-checks, I am confident that he will discover that the President is in the Executive branch of government, and cannot "secure legislative compromises" unless the legislature is willing to compromise. While it's not even slightly surprising that Gerson blames the President for his party's rebuffing the President's attempt to negotiate a long-term budget deal, it is not the President's fault that Speaker Boehner developed wobbly knees when confronted with the need for a tax increase, nor is it his fault that Boehner has not since pushed his party to work with the President on budget issues.

Gerson is apparently asleep at the switch on "future tax rates", as if he reads his own paper he will see that the President is again proposing a deal on future tax rates. It is anticipated that the Republican Party will again refuse to negotiate, and perhaps again throw the country into turmoil through "hostage taking" tactics over the debt ceiling. You want to talk uncertainty? The Republican Party is its leading author.

The fact that Gerson is not even attempting to be serious - that he's coughing out one Republican talking point after another, facts be damned, is illustrated by his reference to the Keystone XL pipeline. The economic benefit of the pipeline, once approved, looks to be minimal, and contrary to Gerson's suggestion there are valid financial arguments about the project - both in terms of exaggerated job creation (permanent jobs will be somewhere between 20 and a few hundred, probably at the lower end) and financial risk. What uncertainty does Gerson imagine has been created by the delay, and how many fingers do I need to use to count the number of businesses affected buy that supposed uncertainty?

Gerson has faith in Romney - that he's soon going to pupate and emerge as, well, probably not a butterfly but perhaps as a reasonably attractive moth?

A humanizing Romney convention speech, some reassuring debate performances, a few innovative policy proposals appealing to Latinos or suburban women — and Romney becomes a more broadly imaginable president.

You will note that when it comes to a Republican all Gerson asks for is a "humanizing" speech (compassionate conservatism?), debate performances that aren't too embarrassing, and some pandering to "Latinos or suburban women". Policy proposals? Get real. Those are for the other side.

Activists Should Assume Voter ID Laws Will Pass

I'm pretty sure I've commented on this before, but (surprise) nobody was paying attention. Even if you believe that voter ID laws are entirely misplaced, that voter fraud has virtually no relevance in any given election, and that voter ID laws are driven by partisan politicians wanting to suppress voter turnout by the other side, you should assume that those laws will pass. Sure, work against them, but work very hard to make sure that the voters likely to be affected by the laws obtain acceptable ID's.

What the law really does is move the field timeline up dramatically, she said. Her group is setting aside many of its normal activities like voter education and is instead scrambling to formulate a plan to get voters without ID into the system with enough time left for them to vote....

Winters set the window to get an ID at “four to six weeks” and said that most of the group’s efforts to find voters without IDs and get them IDs “will have to be done before mid-September.” She said the timeline makes the challenge of getting people ID’d “especially challenging.”

This issue is not new. The national trend is not new. The requirements imposed by voter ID laws are not surprising. Start with the assumption that your state will pass voter ID laws and work hard to get valid ID's into the hands of voters. Most people will benefit from having a valid ID that they can use in other contexts, so even if your state doesn't pass a voter ID law you're doing some good. And if it does, you won't be caught flat-footed.

Justice Roberts, Apostate!

David Frum knows a little bit about apostasy. His abrupt termination by the AEI¹ was reportedly triggered by his "Waterloo" argument, that by choosing to fight healthcare reform rather than participate in the process the Republican Party missed the opportunity to potentially help craft a more conservative bill.

Since his termination, Frum has been attempting to reinvent himself as a different sort of Republican, a sensible Republican who longs for the good old days of bipartisanship (i.e., 5 Democrats joining a Republican bill) and who complains about partisanship, the unseemliness of right-wing radio hosts, and the like. His quest to reinvent himself has not found him a new home in the Republican Party, nor has his retreat from his own past excesses been forgotten by those who might be his allies but for his past attacks. But if Jeb Bush's apparent gamble on the Republican Party's return to moderation is credible, perhaps he'll seem like less of a Cassandra and more of an opinion leader.

Back in his AEI glory days, Frum appeared to be participating in what I jokingly suggested might be a contest between himself and two of his former Bush Administration speechwriting buddies, his ex-boss Michael Gerson and his fellow backbiter Marc Thiessen. The contest appeared to be, who could make the dumbest possible statement about an issue of public controversy and still be taken seriously. The AEI termination led to Frum's gradual, overall withdrawal from the contest - a choice he may regret, given that the apparent prize for the winner(s) is a sinecure on the Washington Post Op/Ed page.

I alluded to Gerson's commentary on the Supreme Court's decision upholding the ACA while poking fun at the ridiculous Peggy Noonan, but that wasn't entirely fair to Frum. Although he does see the Court's decision as contradicting the Republican Agenda, his criticism was directed not at Roberts but at the Republican Party. Once it was Waterloo, now it's a 100 Years War.

On the whole, Marc Thiessen is the clear contest winner - the guy whose arguments are usually devoid of fact or reason, with no apparent consequence to his standing as a conservative commentator. Michael Gerson's columns have gradually faded into mediocrity. It's if he can barely muster the energy to gather the kindling, leaving poor Marc not only to collect the firewood, but also to identify the heretics who must be burned.

When I saw Thiessen's piece today, titled Why is Fred Hiatt So Awful at Picking Op/Ed Columnists Why are Republicans so awful at picking Supreme Court justices, it seemed lucky for Frum that he had thrown in the towel. Thiessen lectures us that,

Democrats have been virtually flawless in appointing reliable liberals to the court. Yet Republicans, more often than not, appoint justices who vote with the other side on critical decisions.

If you actually follow the court, you will recall Justice Stevens' observations that his "transformation" from "conservative" to "liberal" did not actually involve his changing any of his opinions - it resulted from the court's dramatic shift to the right. Reagan's policies and politics would be far too liberal for the modern Republican Party. He appointed his nominees before the individual health insurance mandate was created and advocated by conservatives and the Republican Party, so it shouldn't be particularly surprising that his nominees represented a different brand of conservatism.

Thiessen also forgets that the task of nominating candidates for the Supreme Court belongs to the President, not to the party. Prior to G.W.'s presidency it was difficult to imagine that the Republicans would turn on a president's nominee in the manner in which they turned on Harriet Miers. Thiessen complains that Supreme Court justices don't share his preferred political agenda, and aren't consistently trying to advance his preferred agenda through their service on the Court? Maybe that's because Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush didn't share Thiessen's agenda, and thus didn't apply his litmus tests when selecting candidates. Perhaps also, Supreme Court Justices don't see their job quite the same way Thiessen does.

And that's before we get to the silliness of Thiessen's suggestion that the justices appointed by Democratic Presidents always vote against Thiessen's agenda "on critical decisions". As they say, it all depends on whose ox is getting gored.

Thiessen prattles on with the notion that "Conservatives are pariahs if they vote against the left on certain issues. But if they cross over vote with the left, they are hailed as statesmen." Hardly. Kennedy, generally regarded as the "swing vote" of the current court, is not hailed as a statesman. He's often characterized as having a weak and inconsistent approach to the Constitution, and of tending to patronize women. Who does he imagine he's talking about? Rehnquist? Scalia? Thomas? Alito? Because one example from one case, with cherry-picked quotes from a handful of sources, does not constitute a pattern - even if we ignore the fact that "pre-emptive" attacks are irrelevant to his argument and that it's conservatives like himself who are engaged in the behavior he supposedly deplores.

Thiessen's on a roll,

Liberal nominees can simply affirm liberal positions, while conservatives must speak cryptically in terms of their judicial philosophy.

A statement that leaves me with the firm impression that Thiessen has never read a Supreme Court opinion - majority, concurring or dissent - by any of the Justices he's attacking. If you read a typical Scalia or Thomas opinion and are left scratching your head, "Is he a conservative? It's so... cryptic", all you've established is that you're a dolt.

Thiessen whines,

But legislate from the bench is exactly what Roberts did last week. The law’s proponents consistently rejected the notion that the individual mandate was a tax. But Roberts effectively redrafted the statute, making the mandate a tax in order to declare it constitutional....

That is the kind of sophistry we expect from liberals. The left sees the law as a tool of social justice — so they start with the desired outcome and then come up with legal reasoning to justify it. That is what Roberts did last week. He decided he wanted to uphold Obamacare and rewrote the statute to fit that outcome.

Talk about turning history on its head. Two years ago when the bill passed, conservative commentators regarded it as all-but-certain to pass muster with the Supreme Court. Then, months later, a right-wing law professor invented the "activity/inactivity" distinction that became the centerpiece of the legal attack on the ACA. And it almost worked. As Thiessen knows, Roberts endorsed that newly fabricated "magic bullet" argument - the one that was supposed to take down the ACA (or at least its key elements.

Had the four dissenters joined Roberts in overturning only the mandate and the associated community rating / preexisting condition provisions of the ACA, I think Roberts would have joined with them and that hacks like Thiessen would be praising his brilliance. But Roberts had just one vote to cast. With four Justices voting to uphold the bulk of the ACA, four hungering to overturn the entire Act - including provisions that are already in effect and have absolutely no relation to the mandate - Roberts chose the more judicially conservative approach. Thiessen should perhaps address his anger at the dissenters who, as a result of their eagerness to throw the baby out with the bathwater, ended up preserving both.

No, there's no real intellectual satisfaction to "We'll call it a tax and, voila, constitutional," but that was the avenue that allowed Roberts to join with the dissenters on issues that a better legal analysis would have required him to reject. The better approach would have been either to apply a traditional Commerce Clause analysis, applying existing precedent and discussing the proposed "activity/inactivity" distinction within that framework. Although there's some debate over whether it constitutes dicta or holding, Roberts attempted to articulate a new framework - but in order to avoid a form of activism that would take center stage in Constitutional Law textbooks for decades to come, he found an alternative path to upholding the ACA.

Thiessen sees only two reasons why Roberts would have changed his vote, "[that] he was suddenly convinced by his liberal colleagues, or simply had a failure of nerve". Thiessen apparently cannot contemplate the possibility that given a forced choice between (virtually) all or nothing, Roberts chose the conservative approach - eschewing the activism that hacks like Thiessen claim to detest but, as evidenced by his poisonous diatribe, actually desire. Thiessen falls victim to self-parody,

We need jurists who not only have a philosophy of judicial restraint, but the intestinal fortitude not to be swayed by pressure from the New York Times, the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the legal academy.

Which columnists do you suppose you're more likely to find at a Georgetown cocktail party - those of the New York Times, or those of the Washington Post? Which paper does Thiessen, who is explicitly trying to punish, diminish and marginalize Roberts for voting "the wrong way" on a case, work for, again? What's the point of Thiessen's vitriol, or of his long history of seeking out heretics and calling for their destruction, if not to influence them and others - to try to intimidate them into toeing the party line? And the legal academy? Which justices adhered to precedent and two centuries of Commerce Clause jurisprudence, again? And which glommed onto a less than two-year-old theory concocted by a law professor, then championed by others, as a means of defeating the ACA? Thiessen is entitled to his own opinion column, but not to his own facts.

I was going to declare Thiessen the hands-down winner, but before I had a chance to write anything Gerson came up with a late entry. Another "facts be damned" whine about how conservatives justicescare too much about the institution of the Court to simply aren't able to ram through the Republican agenda.

Perhaps channeling his inner David Brooks, king of the false dichotomy, Gerson pontificates that there are "two varieties of judicial conservatism — institutionalism and constitutionalism".

In [an institutionalist's] view, the court maintains its power by exercising it sparingly — deferring whenever possible to the legislative branch. Institutionalism embodies a temperamental conservatism — a commitment to continuity, humility and prudence.

[Constitutionalists focus] on the rigorous application of the words of the founding document. In this view, the meaning of the text is primary, whatever the political consequences of applying it.

So within the context of this decision, in which five Justices - the dissenters and Roberts - looked at the following Constitutional language:

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

And concluded that the text includes an absolute prohibition on the regulation of what the Court determines to be the regulation of inactivity - imposing a penalty on a person who chooses not to engage in a specific form of commerce - no matter what the facts or how compelling the circumstances. The fundamental "reasoning" for the prohibition is that, although states have long imposed mandates without controversy or excess, to allow even the most modest of mandate in even the most compelling of circumstances would inevitably lead to the government forcing people to buy broccoli. That argument is neither textual nor logical.

Meanwhile it is possible to be a close adherent of the text of the Constitution while also believing that the Court needs to protect its credibility as an institution. Gerson defends the judicial activism of the justices he purports to be constitutionalists, suggesting that they're pushing back against "liberal activism", but that's a self-serving, political argument. In the present case, the concurring opinion represents both the better textual interpretation and (as Gerson concedes) the "institutional conservatism" that Gerson would have us believe is somehow solely the province of Roberts. (Sorry, Michael - Roberts has only one vote - he needed to join with four others for that vote to count for anything.)

Gerson shares, and perhaps parrots, Thiessen's complaint that Roberts turned to Congress's power to tax as his basis for upholding the law. He then presents an addle, social science argument that the mandate might work as a "mandate" but by revealing to people the supposed secret that they could actually choose not to buy insurance and pay a penalty, Roberts has made it more likely that people will regard their choice in economic terms and now be more likely to pick the penalty if they think they'll save money. Seriously? One hardly dares tell Gerson that such "reasoning" has no place in the constitutional analysis of a statute.

Gerson opened his column by casting aspersions on Earl Warren, and closes by cautioning Justice Roberts, in effect, that if he doesn't shape up and start doing what the Republican Party wants him to do, he can expect hacks like Gerson to argue that he's the "new Earl Warren".

On the whole, Gerson seems to be parroting arguments raised by others, perhaps including Thiessen, so I think Thiessen takes the round.
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1. For somebody who cherishes intellectual rigor and honest debate, being fired by the AEI would be a badge of honor... but I presuppose that such a person could get hired by the AEI.