Category Archives: political polarization

Roll Call reports.

The Plum Line says that a majority of Republicans in the House may want the Speaker of the House to pass immigration reform without support from a majority of Republicans:

But either way — however we get there — it is becoming more and more likely that the prospects for real reform turn on whether the House will pass a comprehensive bill with mostly Democratic support. There’s been a lot of speculation that this would cost Boehner his Speakership. But Boehner’s comment — that ultimately this is about “what the House wants” – is telling. If many mainstream House conservatives privately want reform to pass (without voting for it) that very well could happen, with mostly Democratic support, at no real risk to Boehner. The Speaker left the door open to that possibility today, and that’s a big deal.

Bloomberg:  “In a few states, those that are deeply Republican-red or Democratic-blue, the partisan hue is so one-sided that it’s creating super-minorities in some Senate chambers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”

NYT: “Pillory Congress all you want as do-nothing or dysfunctional, as its critics often have. But in one respect, lawmakers in the Capitol are remarkably productive: they name post offices like nobody’s business. A new report from the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research division of Congress, found that about 20 percent of laws passed in recent years were for naming post offices.”

Vandehei and Allen: “So, yes, Boehner by recent historic standards and measures is a relatively weak speaker right now. But, in fairness, it’s not clear a more bullying or forceful leader would fare much better with this gang of Republicans or in this dysfunctional Congress.”

“What I fear is the majority leader is working his way toward breaking his word to the Senate and to the American people, and blowing up this institution…He wants to have no debate…Do what I say when I say it. Sit down, shut up. Or we’ll change the rules. We’ll break the rules to change the rules.’

–Sen. Mitch McConnell, on Senator Harry Reid’s threats to change the rules related to filibustering nominations in the Senate.

Roll Call:

Sen. John McCain finds himself once again pushing his colleagues to avoid giving fodder to Democrats seeking to use the “nuclear option” to change Senate rules with a simple majority.

The Arizona Republican’s latest endeavor is to persuade GOP senators to allow the appointment of conferees to hammer out a House- Senate budget agreement without binding instructions against raising the debt limit.

But his efforts have yet to win over the GOP’s tea party wing.

TPM: “The battle over the filibuster escalated Wednesday as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) jumped in the fray to lash Democrats’ threats to use the “nuclear option” to scrap the minority party’s ability to filibuster presidential nominees to cabinet and judicial positions. He and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) clashed in a heated floor exchange that led to hours of sniping between their offices.

Roll Call:

Senate Democrats picked up some GOP reinforcements in their bid to get to a conference on a House-Senate budget agreement.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine joined Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., on the floor in support of going to conference without imposing special mandates on conferees.

McCain objected to a bid by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to require that Senate budget negotiators not provide for an increase in the debt limit. Instead, McCain called for a more established process of offering nonbinding instructions.

Ezra Klein: a thaw in the Senate?

TPM reports.

Sarah Binder sees confusion ahead.

See here.

Very important NYT article on what’s going on with the Senate, procedurally and politically.

Tyranny of House majority.

NYT Editorial:

“Regular order!” That has been the demand of House Republicans for three years, insisting on a return to the distant days when Congress actually passed budget resolutions and spending bills, instead of paying for the government through shortsighted stopgap measures.

“Senate Democrats have done nothing,” Speaker John Boehner said on “Meet the Press” on March 3, referring to the Senate’s failure to pass a budget since 2009. “It’s time for them to vote. It’s time for us to get back to regular order here in Congress.” The two chambers could try to resolve their differences in a conference committee, he said, “and maybe come to some agreement.”

But a funny thing happened a few days after those comments were made: the Senate agreed to that demand and actually passed a budget. Suddenly all those Republican cries for regular order stopped. Suddenly the House has no interest in a conference with the Senate. Instead, Congress is preparing for yet another budget crisis.

NYT reports.

TPM reports.

Jonathan Bernstein and Sarah Binder.

A self-inflicted wound.

Tonja Jacobi and Jeff Van Dam have posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The filibuster has effectively become a supermajority requirement for all lawmaking in the Senate, an effect worsened by ill-conceived attempts at its reform. Once an obscure budgetary procedure, reconciliation is now the primary mechanism of avoiding filibusters, and so it is now the means by which the most significant pieces of legislation in recent years have been passed. The effectiveness of mechanisms of restraining reconciliation — particularly the Byrd rule — as well as constraints on more meaningful filibuster reform all hinge on who has supervisory power over Senate rules. Ultimately, this rests not in the courts or the Parliamentarian but in the Senate itself. The battle between majoritarian and minoritarian power in the Senate, and so over the nature of legislation creation in Congress, depends upon individual incentives and institutional norms. We show that those incentives are structured towards minoritarian power, due to particularism, institutionalized risk aversion, and path dependence. Consequently, filibuster reform is likely to be continually frustrated, as the most recent skirmish illustrated. Only through the largely accidental change proffered by reconciliation has majoritarian power resurfaced, and yet still the pull of minoritarian influence continues to reassert itself.

Andrew Cohen blogs.

Politico: “The Senate minority leader has signaled privately that he has no interest in sitting in the same room as Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to discuss a possible “grand bargain” on budget and tax issues, Senate insiders tell POLITICO. McConnell is fine with talking to Obama — just talking at this point — but he doesn’t want Reid there when it happens.”

Dan Balz:  “Bipartisanship and cross-party alliances are suddenly in vogue in the Senate this spring. The question is whether the Senate is a leading indicator of a change in politics or largely an aberration in a nation divided along red and blue lines.”

Interesting perspective from Larry Summers.

Eric Alterman Nation column:

Believe me, I’m more annoyed at having to write this column again than you are at reading it. But dammit, nothing changes. The Republican Party has gone off the rails by virtually every available measure, and the media continue to blame “both sides.”

Let’s look at some data. According to a forthcoming study in the Drake Law Review by Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, we are experiencing “the largest and most uniform gap in the ideological orientation and voting patterns in the Senate and the House of Representatives in modern times.”…

WaPo reports.

Seth Masket:

Rick Hasen has a really interesting paper up discussing partisan polarization and the possibility of changing the Constitution to deal with it. (And you should really read Jonathan Bernstein’s response, too.) Hasen starts off by asking whether we should be considering moving toward a more parliamentary style of government.

It’s a fair question. We have what looks like a serious mismatch between our parties and our governing institutions. We live in an era of sharply distinct, internally disciplined, programmatic parties with very different visions of how the nation should be run. That’s fine—we have some time-honored institutions, such as elections and majority-rule legislatures, for settling disagreements, even when the disagreements are sharp.

TPM: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) threatened in his most explicit terms yet to use the so-called nuclear option to weaken the filibuster if Republicans keep blocking judicial and other nominees from coming to a vote.”

NYT: “Members of both parties say Mr. Obama faces a conundrum with his legislative approach to a deeply polarized Congress. In the past, when he has stayed aloof from legislative action, Republicans and others have accused him of a lack of leadership; when he has gotten involved, they have complained that they could not support any bill so closely identified with Mr. Obama without risking the contempt of conservative voters.”

The Fix reports.

Jonathan Bernstein has written this piece for Salon responding to my new draft article (which I presented Saturday at the excellent Drake Law School symposium), Political Dysfunction and Constitutional Change.

Jonathan begins:

The American political system is not broken. What’s broken is the Republican Party. And it’s not clear how it will recover.

What’s wrong with American politics and what can be done about it is the question that election law expert Rick Hasen sets for himself in a fascinating new paper. In particular, he asks whether American politics is so broken that the only cure is to chuck the Constitution and replace it with a parliamentary system or some other radical systemic reform.

He continues:

I think the emphasis on partisan polarization is misplaced. There’s nothing about strong partisanship that makes effective government in the U.S. impossible. That Hasen highlights budget problems makes this, in my view, especially clear. Budgets are, by their nature, fairly easy to cut deals on! Indeed: I suspect the game theorists might actually find that it should be easier for two well-organized parties to cut those deals, even if their ideal points are quite distant, than it would be to reach a deal between unstructured, factionalized parties, even if there are no extremists among them. During the current 113th Congress, all that should be needed is for the captains of both teams to find an agreeable midpoint, and budget issues can be solved.

And yet: dysfunction, crises, threats of shutdown and irrational outcomes no one claims to want.

My conclusion? It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism.

It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken. Not too conservative; not too extreme. I have no view of where the GOP “should” be ideologically, and I don’t think there’s much evidence that being “too conservative” per se is losing elections for Republicans.

I hope to write a response to Jonathan’s very interesting piece soon.  In the meantime, I’ll be doing a live chat tomorrow at Talking Points Memo about the new piece.  It should begin at 6 pm eastern.  Thanks also to Taagen Goddard’s excellent Wonk Wire (now housed at Roll Call) for making my paper its Abstract of the Week.