“An Undemocratic Body Becoming Even More Undemocratic”: Gun Debate Highlights Everything Awful About The U.S. Senate
The Washington Post reported yesterday evening that “senators might be on the cusp of a breakthrough” on gun legislation, after weeks of “stalled negotiations” leading to many observers pronouncing gun control doomed. (Though as Dave Weigel points out, the “all gun legislation is in deep trouble” idea arose mostly because Congress hasn’t been in session and hence no work has been done on any legislation.) The savior: Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who is now negotiating with Democrat Joe Manchin, after it was determined that Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn was not worth wasting any additional time on. Toomey, you see, needs to win reelection in Pennsylvania, so he is going to be more reasonable than someone who won’t have to work very hard at all to win reelection in Oklahoma.
This is basically the way eminent Washington political elites like to pretend that the Senate is supposed to work, and the way they imagine it worked in the idealized past: A very conservative Democrat (from a tiny state) finding common ground with a Republican colleague. The fact that these careful negotiations are required when there are almost certainly already 51 votes for comprehensive background checks isn’t considered particularly distressing or embarrassing. (Negotiations previously seemed on the verge of collapse because no agreement could be brokered between Chuck Schumer, a senator representing 19.5 million people, and Tom Coburn, a senator representing 3.8 million people.) A supermajority must be courted if the senators representing the will of the regular majority of Americans hope to get their way.
There is a villain in the easy narrative, too: Extremists! Specifically, Rand Paul and a band of conservatives, who have promised to filibuster. Oddly, despite most senators — especially Republican senators — agreeing that filibusters are a Cherished Senate Tradition, this promise has received a bit of criticism.
John McCain said yesterday that he doesn’t understand a threat to filibuster any gun control legislation that comes up for a vote. While many of us don’t understand why John McCain, a senator with no leadership position or major national following, is constantly on Sunday news chat shows, we can perhaps help him to figure out what this filibuster thing is about.
Here’s what McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation”:
“I don’t understand it. The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.”
Well. That’s certainly one way of looking at the purpose of the United States Senate, though it’s not a very popular interpretation among senators themselves.
McCain is one of the few senators who can boast of having defeated attempts to kill the filibuster twice, once when he was a member of the 2005 “Gang of 14″ that preserved the filibuster while also allowing for the confirmation of a number of Bush judges, and once at the beginning of this year, when the effectively meaningless “filibuster reform” proposal he crafted with Carl Levin became the apparent blueprint of the “compromise” Harry Reid agreed to in January. The compromise preserved — strengthened, probably — the 60 vote threshold that now subjects all senate business to the approval of the minority party and, often, the whims of the biggest cranks in that party. McCain then joined the filibuster of Caitlin Halligan, whom President Obama had nominated to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Her nomination was withdrawn, and the court remains free of Democratic appointees. Before this, McCain filibustered Obama’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Goodwin Liu. McCain also filibustered Chuck Hagel, a filibuster done primarily to set the precedent that Republicans can filibuster even Defense Secretary nominees, and he filibustered Richard Cordray, Obama’s choice to head an agency Republicans are hoping to filibuster into nonexistence or irrelevance. Those aren’t the showy, talky sorts of filibusters, though, so they do not offend McCain’s sense of decency, like Rand Paul does when he speaks to the chamber instead of quietly voting “no” on cloture motions.
But if the purpose of the senate is to debate and to vote, and filibusters interfere with that purpose, McCain has a bit of explaining to do. (Maybe he will explain next Sunday on one of those awful shows. If someone bothers to ask him about it.)
Still, it is easy to figure out why Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and various nonentities who wish to be associated with Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have preemptively promised to filibuster any gun control legislation: Because people like John McCain have worked quite hard to protect their rights to halt any legislation they please whenever they want for any reason. People like John McCain have done everything they could to make an already undemocratic body even more undemocratic, because doing so helps people like John McCain pretend they are power-brokers and statesmen instead of members of organized political parties representing various interests, elected by people who assume that the party label next to the name is a reliable indicator of how that person will vote once in office.
Senators aren’t the only people committed to the ideal of a Senate full of independent, moderate mavericks. Bad pundits basically eat that shit up. And on the subject of What is Wrong With the Senate, bad pundit Chris Cillizza has written the most inane political column in the history of political columns. It is utterly ahistorical, full of lazy banalities, wholly devoid of insight and it could’ve been written at any point in the last twenty years. If IBM told the development team behind Watson to build an AI capable of writing centrist political analysis columns, that machine would almost certainly write a more interesting and informative column than this one.
This is the dullest imitation Broderism — things used to be better, when grand old moderate men who respected other grand old moderate men ran everything, before the damned liberals and conservatives showed up — I can recall reading in some time. So, the Senate sucks now, because it is more like the House, apparently. (The House of Representatives is America’s more democratic legislative body — though it still grants more power to rural than urban areas — and Beltway elite types hate it because it is loud and full of idiots, like America.)
Things were better before!
The Senate was once regarded as the home of the great political orators of the time — not to mention the body where true dealmaking actually took place. Its members prided themselves on their cool approach to legislating, in contrast with the more brawling nature of the House. Senators, generally, liked one another — no matter their party — and weren’t afraid to show it, either personally or politically.
For years, the Senate was also known as where civil rights and anti-lynching bills go to die, because some of those great political orators devoted their oratory to protecting white supremacy, backed up by violence, at any cost. Many of those racists were much-liked by their fellow senators, of course.
Then we get to the examples, to prove that things are bad now. First, there is now too much “partisanship,” which means party discipline. This happened in part because Republicans became much more disciplined, but also because after the Civil Rights Era conservatives became Republicans and liberals (and moderates) became Democrats, leaving fewer — and then no — random outlier liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats to grant meaningless “bipartisan” approval to liberal and conservative measures.
Second, the filibuster, sort of:
Then, the blockading. As The Post’s Juliet Eilperin noted in a Fix post last week, there are currently 15 judges nominated by President Obama awaiting votes by the full Senate. Thirteen of the 15 — or roughly 87 percent — of those nominees were approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. And even those who get votes often have to wait forever for them. On March 11, for example, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit by a vote of 91 to 0, 484 days after the president nominated him — and he’s far from the only example of that trend.
Did you notice that Cillizza forgot to say “filibuster” in that paragraph?
Finally, the only point Cillizza actually cares about, “the nastiness.” Cillizza says the problem is that so many senators now come from the House, though he is forced to acknowledge that the nastiest new senators — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee — did not come from the House.
Look, here are a bunch of charts about polarization that Cillizza could’ve checked out before he wrote this column in ten minutes. He might’ve learned some stuff! Like that the moderation of the post-war period was actually a weird anomaly. American politics have been otherwise highly polarized since the early days of the Republic. Cillizza also could’ve read this big Adam Liptak piece in the New York Times about the antidemocratic effect of the Senate’s inherent small-state bias and how the normalization of the filibuster has only made the problem worse. He could’ve checked out this editorial in his own newspaper, by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein, pointing out that the “polarization” problem is primarily a problem of Republicans getting much, much more conservative.
These are all points that anyone who has been reading blogs and articles by any number of prominent historians and political scientists (and random smart bloggers!) over the last few years is already familiar with. Cillizza, obviously, has not been reading any political scientists or historians. He has maybe never read anything by any political scientists or historians? He has maybe only been watching Chuck Todd on MSNBC?
If gun control ends up failing, I guarantee that people like Cillizza will continue to long for the days of Civility and Moderation, and the role “moderates” play in enabling extremists will likely only be mentioned by left-wing blogger cranks whom no one takes seriously.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 8, 2013
“This Thinking Is Just Bizarre”: The Gun Debate GOP Senators Are Afraid To Have
Two weeks ago, a trio of right-wing senators — Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Mike Lee of Utah — released a statement explaining their intention to block a debate on any legislation that changes any federal gun law in any way. Soon after, the filibuster threat grew to five members, and over the weekend, the total reached 12.
Remember, these dozen GOP senators aren’t just saying they’re going to oppose legislation, and they’re not merely threatening to block final passage. Rather, these 12 senators are saying they’re not prepared to allow the Senate to even have a debate — even if the legislation would save lives, even if the ideas have bipartisan support, and even if the bill is entirely permissible under the Constitution.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and raised a fair point.
For those who can’t watch clips online, McCain said of Senate Republicans’ vow to filibuster the motion to proceed:
“I don’t understand it. The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand…. What are we afraid of? Why would we not want — if this issue is as important as all of us think it is, why not take it to the world’s greatest deliberative — that’s the greatest exaggeration in history, by the way — but why not take up an amendment and debate?”
I’m not generally inclined to agree with John McCain, but on this, he’s exactly right.
Let’s be clear about the nature of the threat: these 12 Republican senators are saying they’re unwilling to allow the Senate to debate gun legislation. It would be tough enough to craft a bill that can pass both chambers of Congress, but we now have a dozen Republicans who are so scared, they’re afraid of a discussion.
It’s rather bizarre. To reiterate a point from two weeks ago, from the far-right’s perspective, the worst case scenario is easy to imagine: the Senate might pass a bill that Republicans and the NRA don’t like. But even under these circumstances, the legislation would go to the Republican-led House, where progressive legislation has no credible chance of success.
So why go to so much effort to block an argument on the floor of the Senate?
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), not exactly a moderate in his caucus, has a compelling possible explanation (via Igor Volsky).
After Mr. Coburn was asked multiple times an identically worded question about whether he would join Mr. Paul’s effort to block gun legislation as he traveled around Oklahoma in recent days, Mr. Coburn bristled at the idea that Mr. Paul would threaten to filibuster a bill before its contents were made final.
“Is that about filibustering a bill to protect the Second Amendment, or is that about Rand Paul?” Mr. Coburn said at a town-hall meeting at the Oklahoma Sports Museum in Guthrie, Okla., on Wednesday.
What a good question.
As an additional bit of context, let’s also note that the Republican senators whose names are most frequently associated with national 2016 ambitions — Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz — are all part of the dozen who are desperate to block the debate.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 8, 2013
“It’s All About Me”: Rand Paul Criticized By Fellow Republican For Threatening To Filibuster Gun Bill He Hasn’t Even Seen
Thirteen Republican senators have pledged to filibuster a senate debate about new gun safety measures, insisting in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that they will “oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.” The threat, which Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) first made last week without seeing the bill, comes just days before the body prepares to consider the first comprehensive gun legislation in the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The package will expand restrictions against gun trafficking, invest in school safety and provide for universal background checks of all gun purchases.
But one top Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), is speaking out publicly against the group, questioning the wisdom of promising to filibuster legislation that lawmakers have yet to finalize:
After Mr. Coburn was asked multiple times an identically worded question about whether he would join Mr. Paul’s effort to block gun legislation as he traveled around Oklahoma in recent days, Mr. Coburn bristled at the idea that Mr. Paul would threaten to filibuster a bill before its contents were made final.
“Is that about filibustering a bill to protect the Second Amendment, or is that about Rand Paul?” Mr. Coburn said at a town-hall meeting at the Oklahoma Sports Museum in Guthrie, Okla., on Wednesday. “I’ve done more filibusters than Rand Paul is old,” Mr. Coburn said, but he added that he doesn’t announce such moves before he understands the bill.
Coburn is working on compromise legislation that would expand background checks to all gun purchases, but would not require private sellers to keep a record of the transaction, which gun safety advocates say would ensure that checks are being properly conducted and allow the entire chain of custody to be reconstructed in the event the gun is later recovered in a crime.
Should the Republicans proceed to filibuster on the motion to proceed to the gun package, Reid could take advantage of a new Senate rule “by promising each party two amendments on the legislation.” “Under that scenario, Paul and his allies would still get a chance to raise their objections on the floor for hours on end, but they couldn’t stop the Senate from starting debate on the bill,” Politico reports.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, April 6, 2013
“A Devastating Blow To The Scientific Process”: The Idea That Politicians Decide What Is Worthy Of Research Is Perilous
This week, ten years after swearing to destroy Saddam Hussein and build democracy in Iraq, the United States took a step toward dismantling its investment in studying how democracy works.
For more than 15 years, congressional Republicans have been trying to do away with federal funding for political-science research. Every time until now, political scientists successfully fought back. One reason they could: The pot designated for political science in the National Science Foundation (NSF) was a tiny percentage of overall research money—about $10 million out of a $7 billion budget. That’s less than two-tenths of a percent. But it’s also the majority of total grant funding for political-science research. The field provides us with much of what we know about how democracies, including our own, function (and don’t function). Political scientists study how and why opinions change on key issues, what motivates people to vote, and how public opinion influences elected officials. For a relatively small sum, the nation that loves to tout its democratic ideals has been funding projects to investigate how that democracy works (and doesn’t).
Last May, when House Republicans passed an amendment by Congressman Jeff Flake to stop funding the NSF’s Political Science Program, Senate Democrats stopped it from going anywhere. Even New York Times columnist David Brooks got agitated by Flake’s selective targeting of the program, arguing, “This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced—by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.” (If he’s like most political journalists, Brooks uses plenty of NSF-funded data.)
But tucked inside the 600-page continuing resolution the Senate passed on Wednesday afternoon—the measure that must pass to avoid a government shutdown—is an amendment from Republican Senator Tom Coburn, designed to cut off the vast majority of federal support for political-science research. The amendment prevents the National Science Foundation from funding its Political Science Program, “except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”
Perhaps most surprising, the resolution passed by a voice vote, meaning there was no real opposition from Democrats. It’s quite a turnabout. Democrats have long supported research grants for the social sciences. When Coburn introduced a similar amendment in 2009, Democrat Barbara Mikulski went on the offensive: “This amendment is an attack on science. It is an attack on academia,” she said. “We need full funding to keep America innovative.”
But this time around, Senator Mikulski, as appropriations chair, was shepherding a difficult piece of legislation through the body as Republicans threatened a government shutdown. Democratic leaders were afraid that if Coburn didn’t get his way on the amendment, he would slow down the continuing resolution. That might have doomed the thing, with Congress headed to recess. Instead, it seems Coburn modified his original amendment to assuage the Democrats. His new language permitted the NSF to allow exceptions for political projects that “promote national security or the economic interests” of the country. Instead of cutting the $10 million allotted for the Political Science Program, the measure simply prohibits grants in political science. The NSF gets to keep the money for other purposes.
“It reflects the nature of the Senate more than it reflects any shifting views or shifting support,” says Thomas Mann, political scientist and congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. “If there were a [roll call] vote on this, it never would have passed.” The House has already shown its support for a similar measure. The die has been cast, at least in the short term. Democrats will have a chance to undo the measure in October, when Congress will need to pass another budget for the next fiscal year.
The American Political Science Association called the decision “a devastating blow to the integrity of the scientific process.” That’s not overstating things, even if $10 million looks like a drop (if that) in the national budgetary bucket. If you care about scientific process generally, it’s not hard to see why the amendment is an ominous portent for other NSF programs. Growing up as the daughter of a political scientist who received several NSF grants, I was well aware of their importance, not only to political-science research but to the social sciences in general. Fields like sociology, psychology, and economics also rely heavily on NSF funding—and could also fall victim to the whims of an influential member of Congress. What if Senator Coburn next decides that sociological studies of gender and homophobia are frivolous? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has already expressed his support for getting rid of funding for all social-science research, even though the combined budget for those programs is less than 3 percent of total NSF funding.
The situation could easily spread further, into the many parts of the hard sciences that are just as easily politicized—say, evolutionary biology or climate change. When the Flake amendment entered the House, the science magazine Nature wrote an editorial detailing the threat to all fields: “Scientists should ask themselves which vulnerable research programme could be next on the hit list,” the piece read. “The idea that politicians should decide what is worthy of research is perilous.”
Second, political-science research is important. NSF funds a number of major projects that inform much of how we understand our system. For instance, for decades, the Political Science Program has funded the National Election Study, a multimillion-dollar project run out of the University of Michigan. The data, freely available to anyone, provides the most comprehensive look at how American political opinion has changed over time on key issues. Through the study, we can track the evolution of partisan identification, public opinion, and a variety of other key issues over decades. The findings are used by journalists and campaigns, and they’re used to train undergraduates and graduate students in research. If the study ceases, there will suddenly be no way to see long-term trends in the American electorate.
Other Political Science Program studies have investigated questions that are important to our functioning democracy but not particularly easy to raise money for—like gender gaps in political ambition or how responsive elected officials really are to public opinion. Furthermore, the research has helped develop a number of statistical and methodological tools, like computer-assisted interviewing, which has since become standard in private-sector research.
Without NSF, many of these projects may go unfunded. Political-science research, like most academic research, relies on outside funding. Universities pay professors’ salaries and offer basic infrastructure—the buildings in which the research can take place, for instance—but most of the actual dollars for research come from grants. NSF funds 61 percent of political-science research. “There are other opportunities out there” for funding, says John McIver, who ran NSF’s Political Science Program in the mid-1990s. “But there are no pots as big as the NSF program. It’s going to be hard for big political science to continue.”
Why would political science be singled out for cuts in the first place? Coburn says he opposes the funding because the $10 million spent on political science takes away $10 million from studies of diseases or other causes deemed more worthy. In a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation earlier this month, he argued, “Discontinuing funding for these types of studies will increase our ability to fund research into basic fields of mathematics and science such as engineering, biology, physics, and technology.”
Of course, the National Science Foundation has a number of programs that have no direct economic or medical benefits. Physicists spend millions studying dark matter; not only have some of those studies failed to reach a conclusion but the research has no impact on most of our lives. Political-science research also makes its way into Congress—as the political scientist John Sides noted in 2011, even Coburn hasn’t let his opposition to NSF’s political-science grants stop him from relying on NSF-funded political-science research when the research bolsters his own positions. In one debate, he cited NSF-funded research to demonstrate the lack of congressional oversight of the Government Accountability Office.
Singling out political science for a cut seems absurd, until you consider that political scientists conduct research about elected officials and also that this research (usually) doesn’t rely on access or parlor games. Unlike reporters, who must establish relationships to gain access and information—and risk getting shut out when they write something controversial—political scientists have been free to critique and explain our political process, warts and all, and have never had to fear political repercussions. Until now, it seems. “Members of Congress don’t like research being done about members of Congress,” McIver says. “In a world in which Congress has an 11-percent approval rate, Congress is not happy to know there’s research being done specially on that topic.” As if to prove his point, Senator Coburn has repeatedly insisted that there’s no need to fund studies of the GOP’s use of the filibuster. It just so happens that many political scientists are eager to examine how the tool has been used (if not abused) under the current Republican leadership in the Senate.
Coburn’s attempt to stifle political science probably won’t succeed for long. Democrats are expected to restore the status quo by next October. But the fact that this decision was made at all is worrying. Flake, Coburn, and Cantor aren’t likely to let this go, especially now that they’ve had a taste of success.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 23, 2013
“Obama’s Outreach Isn’t New”: When Dealing With Obstructionist’s, The Larger Dynamic Won’t Budge
After President Obama treated 12 Republican senators to dinner, and had a nice lunch with House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the Beltway’s reaction can be summarized in one word: Finally.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who attended Wednesday’s dinner, said, “This is the first step that the president has made to really reach out and do like other presidents in the past — develop relationships and build trust.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) added, “After being in office four years, he’s actually going to sit down and talk to members.”
And while plenty of pundits are echoing the sentiments, John Dickerson notes that those who insist this is a first for Obama are mistaken.
The aloof president is reaching out. That was the media’s first gloss on the president’s new robust effort at networking. He had finally embraced a Truth of Washington: You must engage your opponents and work with them. Finally he’s showing leadership. Hooray! […]
But this isn’t the first time the president has tried…. Early in his first term, during negotiations over the stimulus package, he reached out to Sens. Grassley, Snowe, Collins, and Specter…. Obama may not be very good at trying to work Congress; he may only have done it in fits and starts, but you can’t say he hasn’t tried.
On the Recovery Act, Obama reached out to Republican lawmakers. On health care, the president not only reached out, he spent about as much time talking to Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as he did talking to his own staff. In May 2011, Obama invited a bipartisan group to the White House, not for a meeting or policy negotiations, but as part of “a get-to-know-you effort in the spirit of bipartisanship and collegiality.” In one of my very favorite moments of Obama’s presidency to date, he even attended a House Republican retreat, engaging in a spirited Q&A.
But, my DC pundit friends will tell me, these outreach efforts don’t count because they were in professional settings. What Obama needs to do is try personal outreach in informal ways and friendly settings. Except, the president has tried this, too, inviting members to the White House for Super Bowl and March Madness parties, and even golfing with Boehner.
Those who keep asking why Obama hasn’t reached out before this week don’t seem to be paying close enough attention.
So, why haven’t the efforts paid dividends? Dickerson has some worthwhile ideas on the subject, but for what it’s worth, I’ll add some speculation of my own.
For one thing, the parties sharply disagree with one another — there is no modern precedent for partisan polarization as intense as today’s status quo — and presidential outreach won’t change that. Congressional Republicans tend to fundamentally reject just about everything the White House wants, believes, and perceives as true. Presidential face-time changes nothing.
For another, outreach may help set the stage for constructive negotiations, but compromise has been rendered all but impossible, not just because Republicans reflexively oppose everything Obama supports — including, at times, their own ideas — but also because the parties can’t horse-trade when one side doesn’t have much of a wish list.
Jonathan Bernstein had a very smart post on this yesterday.
In a world of divided government with two sensible parties, the logical compromise is that Republicans would trade the minimum wage hike — a popular policy Democrats care more about than Republicans anyway — for something which Republicans care about more than Democrats. That’s what happened last time, when Republicans were able to extract tax cuts for business in exchange for supporting the increase, with the whole thing going into a larger bill that had plenty of things for both parties.
And this gets at a larger problem that explains a lot about dysfunction in Washington right now: Republicans have largely given up on developing specific policy goals while becoming more and more dedicated to opposing compromise on everything as some sort of fundamental principle.
Think about it: what is the Republican agenda item the party could trade for a minimum wage increase? What’s the GOP policy request on health care, other than the dream of repealing the Affordable Care Act? What’s their policy request on climate? Energy? Education? I mostly have no idea.
And neither do I. Sure, it’s obvious Republicans have some vague policy preferences — energy = drilling; education = vouchers — and certainly stick to broad principles on tax cuts, but the traditional give-and-take process falls apart when transactional policymaking isn’t a possibility.
Obama could host luncheons and dinners every day, but this larger dynamic won’t budge.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
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