Less obvious? It’s bad for Republicans.

Now, in electoral terms, it can’t be bad for both parties, since electoral politics is a zero-sum game. Indeed, that’s sort of the problem for Republicans; obstruction of these nominations almost certainly has zero electoral effect. After all, most voters couldn’t tell you who the nominees for secretary of labor or to head the Environmental Protection Agency are, let alone the obscure rules Republicans are using to delay their confirmation.

So the effects of massive, across-the-board obstruction are going to be on policy, not elections. And that’s not a zero-sum game – and it will hurt Republicans and Republican-aligned groups, too.

Continue Reading...

Paul the Younger hasn’t disguised the plain fact that he’s running for the 2016 Republican nomination for president; he’s already begun making appearances in early primary and caucus states, and this week he started putting in motion the machinery for a presidential campaign.  It’s always possible he won’t be running in 2016 – but for now, he’s certainly running for 2016.

And yet … Rand Paul faces very long odds. Perhaps not quite as long as his father did in his numerous presidential runs, but long enough.

There are basically two questions to ask about whether someone would be a viable candidate for a major party nomination. First, a candidate must have conventional qualifications. Paul certainly clears that hurdle, although not all that impressively. By 2016, he’ll be finishing up a full Senate term. That’s a little more than Barack Obama had (presumably Obama’s state legislative service meant little on this score). It’s more than Mitt Romney, a one-term governor, had. It’s the same number of years as George W. Bush, although Bush had the added qualification of having been reelected. So there’s no real barrier there.

Continue Reading...

It’s just as bad an idea now as ever.

Just to briefly remind everyone why it’s such a bad idea, it really comes down to this: The federal government is going to develop policies. Liberal policies, conservative policies, whatever: The government will develop and carry out choices about public policy. Each of these choices winds up being a struggle among a whole lot of players: the president; members of the House and the Senate; the political parties; interest groups; the permanent bureaucracy in executive branch departments and agencies.

Continue Reading...

While I’ve been saying that the GOP is broken and hopelessly dysfunctional, Rachel Maddow has come up with a new name for part of that dysfunction: Republicans are “post-policy.” To some extent, that’s because they’ll simply oppose whatever Barack Obama proposes, but there’s also an even more interesting aspect of it that they simply have given up on and lost the capacity for developing policy ideas.

And, no, it’s not just because they are conservatives and conservatives are inherently less likely to have policy ideas. A look at the evidence will demonstrate this.

Here’s the story: Over the last couple of decades, majority parties in the House of Representatives have taken to reserving the very first bill numbers for their party’s agenda. Normally, bills are just numbered in order, when they are introduced: H.R. 637 is usually the bill introduced just after H.R. 636 and just before H.R. 638. But that’s just custom, and at some point a new custom evolved to save H.R. 1 through H.R. 5, and then through H.R. 10, for important party agenda bills.

Continue Reading...

So, if you want to support Obama’s agenda, and you want to make the most efficient donation you can, should you send money?

Nope. Here’s the thing. There are basically two reasons to support OFA, and both of them, I’d argue, can be better accomplished by putting your money elsewhere.

The first purpose of OFA would be to directly help the president’s agenda in Congress. It’s not particularly likely, however, that OFA, no matter how much money it can raise, could do that. Political scientists have found very little success for the presidential strategy of going over the heads of Congress in hopes that voters can pressure their representatives to do what the president wants.

Continue Reading...

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.

Hasen lays out the well-known case of dysfunction (perhaps best set out in Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s recent "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks") and considers, but mostly rejects, three possible rejoinders: that gridlock is actually what voters want; that gridlock is to some extent an illusion, and the system is more productive than frustrated partisans believe; and that dysfunction is real but could be cured by less-drastic measures such as Senate reform and electoral reform.

Continue Reading...

Retiring and giving up her final years on the nation’s high court is a lot to ask from Ginsburg, who has been a liberal hero for many years. But just as she was a liberal hero before serving on the Supreme Court, she can be a liberal hero again by leaving it.

This is all pretty straightforward. Ginsburg is 80. Her health is apparently fine now, although she’s a two-time cancer survivor. There’s every possibility she could not only continue in office beyond the Barack Obama presidency but that she could survive even eight years of a Republican in office after that, if that’s what’s in the cards.

And yet: “Every possibility” isn’t good enough. Ginsburg will turn 84 soon after Obama’s successor will be sworn in. Realistically, anyone planning for the future has to assume there’s a 50 percent chance of that successor being a Republican.

Moreover, the simple fact is that most Republicans will support a filibuster against any Supreme Court nominee. Right now, the 55 Democrats (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) may be enough, combined with a handful of Republicans who are moderate enough or simply oppose knee-jerk filibusters, to get a nominee confirmed.

Continue Reading...

At any rate, forget all that: the new fantasy candidate for conservatives is Dr. Benjamin Carson, a neonatal surgeon, with no political experience, who achieved the status of dream presidential nominee by virtue of giving a good speech at the conservative conference CPAC last week. By late Thursday afternoon, he was explaining to CNN's Jake Tapper the circumstances under which he'd consider a bid for the White House in 2016.

Continue Reading...

It’s a myth.

But expect to see plenty of it. It was a widely circulated myth during the last cycle, and the nomination of Mitt Romney will surely entrench the myth even more. But still, it’s a myth.

Of course it is true that parties – all parties – are most likely to nominate a candidate who enters the fight as the clear leader. But if “next in line” is more than just a trite statement that strong candidates usually do well, then it doesn’t help to predict anything.

Continue Reading...

And yet … the Senate still holds a place in the mythology of American democracy that the House of Representatives never has. Reporters and pundits who hate modern filibusters look longingly at the fictional Jimmy Stewart filibuster in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and are quick with praise whenever serious debates break out on the Senate floor.

The Senate does have some advantages over the modern House, but that it has potential to be a better debating society isn’t one of them, or at least not an important one. So I won’t be celebrating Rand Paul’s day-long speech this week as an example of what filibusters should look like.

Instead, I’ll celebrate it for something a little different: Paul was trying to use the leverage that chamber rules give individual senators and small groups of senators.

Continue Reading...

If you’re reading about politics, of course you remember the fight that took up a fair amount of space in the political press over the last month.

Most Americans, however, ignored the whole thing; even among those dimly aware of it, the memory will fade rapidly. And that suggests an important lesson for Barack Obama in this flap: Don’t worry about losing a few news cycles. If it’s just about media flaps, the president has much more room for risk-taking than he may realize.

First, the evidence. There's very limited polling, but what there is suggests no one was paying any attention. A Quinnipiac poll taken at the beginning of February found a net-unfavorable rating … but with only 14 percent liking the former Nebraska senator, 18 percent not liking him, and an overwhelming 67 percent saying that they didn’t have an opinion. That’s before either of the filibuster votes on the Senate floor, but after his well-publicized Senate hearing.

Continue Reading...

That’s because Republicans are doing everything possible to remind Barack Obama, and other Democrats, that Republicans are at least as interested in using negotiations as an opportunity to generate material for future ad campaigns as they are in striking deals.

Continue Reading...

The Hagel filibuster seems to have fired up interest in Senate procedure, but it’s actually a little difficult to figure out what, if anything, is so unprecedented. The one thing that’s clearly new is that it’s the first time a cabinet nominee has lost a cloture vote. However, it’s certainly not the first time that 60 votes was required for a cabinet post; it's not the first time that a cabinet nomination was delayed by opposition; and if current reports are correct, it won’t be the first time a cabinet nomination has been defeated by a filibuster. It certainly isn’t the first time a cloture vote has failed on an executive branch pick, or even a high-profile pick.

Continue Reading...

Begin with the good. Both Republicans, and to a larger extent Democrats, used this week’s hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan for exactly what the process should be used for: oversight. The Intelligence Committee first used the hearing to successfully push the Obama administration to release at least one document that they had wanted, and then it asked for even more – and extracted commitments of future cooperation from the nominee. They also pressed Brennan on a number of both his and, more importantly, the administration’s policies and views on several issues, including drones and torture.

We might debate how well the Intelligence Committee did their job, but at the very least they were trying.

Continue Reading...

After all, most of the ugly Republican candidates from the last two cycles were relatively underfunded in their primaries; a little more money thrown into the pot against them is unlikely to make a difference, and it might, as Saloncolumnist Steve Kornacki has argued, even backfire if it winds up drawing Tea Party activists into a fight they might otherwise have ignored. At best, it will help on the margins.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

So it’s always worthwhile to point out examples of it, and this week supplied a doozy: the idea that Chuck Hagel is, as Bill Kristol put it, “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”

I’m not sure where the first instance of it appeared, but the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin used it in a Jan. 7 post. To her credit, I suppose, Rubin’s use of the Miers analogy at least fit the situation she described. The problem, unfortunately, is that what she described was completely removed from reality – a nomination so anathema to mainstream Democrats that Hagel might be forced to withdraw before a confirmation hearing. Of course, in actuality, every Democrat who took a position before Hagel’s hearing supported his nomination. Oops!

But that hasn’t killed off the increasingly wrongheaded Miers analogy. Not at all. It showed up after Hagel’s hearing from Kristol and from National Review’s Dan Foster, who called him “Harriet Hagel.”

Continue Reading...

Why? Because competition for nominations is the best way for most of us to really affect what happens in a democracy. A walkover for Clinton would mean that Democrats – activists, donors, party officials and staff, and everyone else – would give up their best chance for leverage over the political system.

Indeed, this gets into what democracy really is and how it functions. The key is the limited ability of voters-as-just-voters to really do much. After all, suppose you voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in November. What message did you send? That you liked the Affordable Care Act? Wanted to reward Obama for the death of bin Laden? Didn’t like Paul Ryan’s House budget? Support marriage equality, or abortion rights, or voting rights? Oppose the war in Iraq? Or perhaps you happen to be expressing ethnic solidarity with Obama; perhaps you are a bigot and don’t like Mormons. Or maybe you didn’t like the 47 percent stuff, or you’re punishing the GOP for George W. Bush. Maybe you just like the cut of Barack Obama’s jib.

Continue Reading...

Case in point: Jonathan Chait beat up on David Brooks on Friday. It's brutal, and I have nothing particular to say about the details. But I do question this:

Moderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party. Many moderate conservatives have simply broken off from the party, at least in its current incarnation, and are hoping or working to build a sane alternative. Those who remain must escape into progressively more baroque fantasies.

Well, maybe.

I think there's a far easier institutional explanation for the regularly contorted efforts of Brooks (and Ross Douthat): The job demands it.

Continue Reading...

Another more pressing worry for the Obama administration: impeachment. With a majority in the House, Republicans could easily start impeachment proceedings. And while conviction in the Senate is virtually impossible, as Democrats would not join to create the two-thirds majority needed, merely launching the impeachment process would be politically devastating for President Obama, as it was for President Clinton.

It’s worth paying some attention to this, because it’s unlikely to be an isolated concern. Should President Obama somehow manage to skate through the upcoming debt limit confrontation without articles of impeachment drawn up, we can fully expect impeachment to hover over future fights between the Republican House and the Democrat in the Oval Office.

Continue Reading...