Falsus in uno, falsus in cromnibus

Can't find a source for this; it's been on Twitter a lot.

Atrios writes:

One trick elite editorial boards regularly play is offering narratives of "bipartisanship" and "compromise" that don't really conform to their readers' understanding of those words. I mean, compromise is a good thing, right? Who doesn't love compromise!

But true bipartisanship, where lots of members of both parties actually agree on something (even if they pretend not to), is the way that Congress passes things that voters actually hate. Actual compromise would involve Dems giving up something in exchange for something Republicans want, and vice versa, not "let's pass this piece of shit that everybody but Fred Hiatt and our donors hate."

That's not exactly how I've seen it, from a partisan point of view: to me there's a clear asymmetry between "what Democrats want" and "what Republicans want" in that the former as a party are relatively more interested in voters and the latter in donors (and in Fred Hiatt, for whatever strange reasons), so that talking about the possibility of compromise between Democrats and Republicans is misreading a bit what the options are.

That is, what Democrats want, in the terms of the specific programs endorsed in their platforms, I'm not talking about boilerplate rhetoric, is protection for employees and consumers in the first place, members of various disadvantaged minority groups, women; against the threats to their freedom posed by employers and producers, racists, and patriarchalists. However frail they may be in standing up for this stuff, however seducible at a given moment by donors looking to get a cut out of a program (charter school investors, for instance, or Schumer's banking friends and Feinstein's defense contractors), that is what they stand for.

Republicans want, in terms of specific programs, protections for employers and producers against threats to their freedom posed by working and poor people (and people's government); that is, for the big campaign contributors, and since these don't constitute enough people to win an election, they throw in some repression against or neglect toward minority members and women, but it isn't the big thing for them. They may allow certain types of "social conservative" legislation, but you'll never convince me that somebody like John Boehner or Mitch McConnell really gives a shit one way or another whether abortion is legal or not or dudes get married to each other. What they care about is the misogynist and homophobic vote from people who are so excited over these issues that they won't notice they're being killed by the deregulation of the finance industry and the despoiling of the landscape; which can make them, unfortunately, a winning team, especially in the almost uninhabited desert of an off-year state legislative election.

And they'll enjoy listening to the Tea Party rail against bailed-out Wall Street as long as the Tea Party never proposes a solution to finance industry corruption, and you'll notice they never do (unless it's some dead-in-the-water retroactionary proposal like closing the Federal Reserve bank or going on the gold standard).

If you think in terms of the voters, only one side in the cronut bill passed yesterday by the Senate really did give something up. To working class voters who know they're working class, the losses are substantial, though not devastating, going by the list mounted at ThinkProgress:

• loss of the Dodd-Frank rule against credit-default swaps and similar derivative investments using money protected by federal insurance
• cuts in IRS enforcement budget, making it easier for the rich to dodge taxes
• inadequate funding of commodity futures regulation
• inadequate funding of anti-homelessness efforts
• shift of money from students (Pell grants) to bankers (private student loanmakers)
• suspending regulations specifying required sleep hours for long-distance truckers
• possibly preventing the District of Columbia from honoring its voters' decision to legalize marijuana
• increasing limits on contributions to political parties tenfold, from $32,400 to 324,000

Whereas what the voters on the other side imagined they'd lost was phantoms; as Sarah Palin prayerfully put it:

Good Lord,
America said loud and clear
not just “no” but “hell no”
to Obama’s failed policies.

Americans who pay attention
said absolutely no
to Obama’s amnesty
for illegal aliens.

We also said no
to the mother-of-all
unfunded mandates,
Obamacare,

and voters believed promises
that they would ratchet down
the $18 trillion debt.

Well, our bad for
apathetically
trusting
politicians.

In a weird way, Palin is right; the Tea Party wasn't at the table at all.

Nobody is interested in their idea of eliminating illegal immigration and deporting all the overstayers; the issue is between the fat cats who prefer it to be relatively unregulated (for cheaper, more exploitable workers) and those who want to regulate it without hurting innocent people. (Also a two-year delay in deportation is not an "amnesty".)

Nobody with any power wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act either, especially the most interested fat cats, those in the hospital and insurance industries; they just want to threaten to repeal it as a way of staving off regulation (I'm already hearing some ghastly stories about unconscionable premium rises this year; unlike last year's Obamacare Tragedy Watch stories, they're from people who are not liars). Though I certainly don't know what Palin means by "unfunded mandate"—it's not the usual definition, because the bill was always projected to save the states a lot of money, not to cost them any:

And nobody, finally, honestly thought there was any chance of decreasing the total national debt. The fat cats said they wanted the deficit reduced, and it has been, by over two thirds in the past six years, to where it was before the 2008 meltdown. I'm sorry about that, I always thought the deficit should have been a lot higher than it was at least for 2009-12, but nobody listened to me. (Krugman thinks fat cats secretly like big budget deficits because they encourage cuts in social programs.)

Anyway, in all these cases the debate is basically less between Democrats and Republicans than the people and the patricians, the 99% and the 1%, and it's not a question so much of you give me that policy and I'll give you this one as it is a dickering over bottom lines in expenditures and preexisting regulatory frameworks. And there actually is a compromise there, in that nobody gets to draw the lines where they like. A pretty shitty compromise from our standpoint, because their side has an awful lot of power, but a compromise nevertheless.

And sometimes not as bad as it looks: something really interesting I noticed today, reading up on that Wall Street swaps push-out rule that was abandoned in the Cromnibus, to the fury of our Elizabeth Warren and so many other good-hearted individuals: it's that the bankers may have largely stopped doing those things anyhow, since last spring. They had until July 2014 to comply with the rule, but they started doing it over a year early, pushing their swaps voluntarily into uninsured offshore subsidiaries. Apparently they were doing it because of other rules, transparency rules for the insured units, that they didn't want to comply with.

So it looks as if the Democrats' surrender on that one was precisely because it doesn't make any difference: they were dropping restrictions on a type of trade that no longer exists, so that we didn't lose at all. There's an echo there of April 2011 and those other situations, as I was writing back in early 2012,

when our Barack Obama and/or the Democrats in Congress are negotiating with Republicans over some large package of legislation: we'll be watching Obama cave, cave, cave and growing ever more dispirited, until when the legislative language comes out at last we greet it with howls of despair—Betrayed! Betrayed again!

And then overnight something funny happens—as the Republicans read the legislation, they find their victory dissipating before their eyes: cuts in taxes suddenly seem more progressive than they were led to believe, or cuts in programs turn out to be cuts to increases they didn't realize they had agreed to, and the whole thing just doesn't look quite "conservative" in the cold light of day, as in the case of last April's budget deal, as blogged by Stephen Stromberg in the Post:

One could smell the concern from Boehner's office all day on Thursday; his staff sent out press release after press release defending the deal's numbers, and they called an unplanned meeting to explain the intricacies of federal budgeting to the GOP caucus. Most Republicans came around.

But, given that some GOP lawmakers may still feel misled, they might be angrier when Boehner wants to raise the federal debt ceiling in a few weeks. The base might not be all that excited, either. Boehner and the Democrats waged near total war over cutting a pittance from the 2011 budget — and, it turns out, even those cuts came with a confusing asterisk.

It's a pretty narrow victory Obama squeezes out of them time after time (considerably helped out not only by the skills of Pelosi and Reid but also the incompetence of Boehner and Mitchell), but it's a victory all the same, and that's actually a lot under the circumstances. We should really try to acknowledge it, acknowledge our own role in it, and remember that that story is always developing....