Lectiones: Democratic Mojo

 

Filibuster

Speaking of abolishing ICE without abolishing ICE, Ian Milhiser at Vox offers a repertory of techniques for abolishing the filibuster without abolishing the filibuster, by scraping away at it bit by bit until it's small enough to, you know, drown in the bathtub:

• Make fewer bills subject to the filibuster: The Senate can create carveouts and exempt certain matters from the filibuster altogether, as it does with bills subject to the reconciliation process.
• Reduce the power of individual rogue senators: The Senate could make it harder to initiate a filibuster. Right now, unanimous consent is required to hold a vote without invoking the time-consuming cloture process. But the rules could be changed to allow an immediate vote unless a larger bloc of senators — perhaps two or five or 10 — objected to such a vote, instead of just one.
• Make it easier to break a filibuster: The Senate could reduce the number of votes necessary to invoke cloture. This could be done as an across-the-board reform, like the 1975 change to the filibuster rule that reduced the cloture threshold from 67 to 60. Or it could be done by creating a carveout for certain matters, such as the 2013 and 2017 reforms that allowed presidential nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.
• Reduce or eliminate the time it takes to invoke cloture: The Senate could reduce the amount of time necessary to invoke cloture and conduct a final vote. This could be done by allowing a swifter vote on a cloture petition, by reducing or eliminating the time devoted to post-closure debate, or both.

The Senate changes the rules all the time, by simple majority vote—that's how they made it possible for Obama to nominate a bunch of judges and about 170 executive-branch officers—and it would be so much easier to carry on with it that way, giving Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cover to vote for it (in 2011, Manchin voted for a great reform idea, that of forcing anybody who wanted to stop the cloture vote to give a good old-fashioned Mr. Smith Goes to Washington talking filibuster, but it didn't get past McConnell) without breaking their promises.

For the Record: Biden's Proposal

You wouldn't fuss about moving the Overton window if it was a big enough window. You wouldn't even want to. Photo via.

Incredibly impressed with myself over this tribute from my favorite moderately famous economics professor.

That started with a quick Twitter version of an argument I feel like I've been making forever, attached in this case to the Biden Covid relief proposal-package, which is pretty amazing:

Whig measures & Tory men!

— Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' (@delong) January 15, 2021

Well, sort of. Lovestoneite measures and Whiggish men and women, more like, in my case, but it's the same principle, where you might talk about widening the Overton window instead of moving it.

But I do feel tremendously justified by the radical character of this Biden package, with its demands for

The Audacity of Moderation

Why does David Brooks think Norway doesn't have a generous social welfare safety net? Because they obviously can't affjord it! Image stolen from some stupid conservative Australian website that didn't credit it anyway.

Shorter David Brooks, "Moderates Have the Better Story", New York Times, 2 July 2019: 

Have I got a story for you! Not the tired old progressive story, the gloom and carnage mind-set of Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, in which global capitalism is a war zone and government must be on a war footing, controlling and protecting the population and giving it free stuff, but a new, boldly moderate story of a world where everything is just great now, with our new global middle class providing more creativity than ever before. The job of government could be to create a citizenry with the vigorous virtues—daring, empowered, always learning, always brave—as they do in the Nordic countries, which are not socialist wonderlands, whatever you may have been told. Why, they don't have minimum wages or estate taxes! Unlike Elizabeth Warren, who won't allow private day care and uses her so-called Green New Deal to stifle free trade. 

Honest to God, he's that crazed today, I don't even know where to start.

First, learn from the Nordic countries. American progressives sometimes imagine that the Nordic countries are socialist wonderlands. They are not. The Nordic countries have strong social supports and also open free-market economies. In fact, they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

I guess I should start by acknowledging that the Nordic countries are not socialist wonderlands. It's true and it's true that a lot of people don't know that! (Including, I'm sorry to say, Senator Sanders.) Rather than adopting the socialist program of replacing private capital with public capital and putting the means of production under the ownership of the state, they have chosen to regulate private capital so as to minimize its ferocious injustices and abuses. They are social democracies:

Spreading Derangement

Calling Dr. Laing! Image from Wikimedia Commons via IRETA.

The good news coming from last week's attempted murder by USPS package delivery of everybody Trump denounces in his rallies, from George Soros through Hillary Clinton to Maxine Waters, and the actual gun murders of Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Kroger's where the gunman looking for black people to kill resorted after he was frustrated in his efforts to shoot up the nearby First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown, Kentucky, and of the 11 congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I can't name them all but their memory is a blessing...

The good news, I was saying, for David Brooks ("The New Cold War"), is that we don't have to worry so much about racism or anti-Semitism or guns or the president's poisonous language, or any other problems that a community might set about trying to solve in a practical effort:

These mass killings are about many things — guns, demagogy, etc. — but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind.

Killing sprees are just one manifestation of the fact that millions of Americans find themselves isolated and alone. But there are other manifestations of this isolation, which involve far more carnage.

The bad news is that that violence is nothing compared to self-murder, quickly by gun or slowly by hypodermic, and as far as I would know the numbers he offers are correct:

Annals of Derp: Man to Mann

Image by shooteradolf/deviantart.

David Brooks, in spite of his faith in "the glory of democracy" ("The Glory of Democracy"), fears that democracy is on its way out:

Tribalism and authoritarianism are now on the march while the number of democracies declines. Far worse has been the degradation of democracies, especially in our own country. The Congress barely functions. We have a president who ignores facts and violates basic decency. On college campuses, according to a Brookings/UCLA survey, 50 percent of students believe that “offensive” speech should be shouted down and 20 percent believe it should be violently crushed.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that 50% of college students believe "offensive" speech should be shouted down and 20% that it should be violently crushed?

Answer: In principle, yes, but (according to Lois Beckett's report at the Guardian, which it took Dr. Google less than two minutes to locate)