Russ Roberts and Yuval Levin on national unity; Scott Yenor on Levin's latest book; William Galston on Mr. Trump's expansive ideas for using executive power; and my feeling of being under siege
Re your exerpt from Galston: reigning in Federal agencies is not an expansion of executive power. Good or bad, it is a reshuffling of executive power to bring it back under democratic control and in to line with the Constitution.
Super majorities of 2/3 should have been enshrined in the Constitution itself at the level of Congressional legislation right from the start. The people who wrote it misjudged the strength The of Bill of Rights. What we actually got was the federal government chipping away relentlessly at the Bill of Rights and all three articles of the constitution using both occasional majorities in Congress and the growth of the now untouchable administrative state- and doing so for 230 years. If it doesn't stop, it will lead to a violent rupture or Orwell will turn out to have just been Cassandra all along.
Yep "holdup" risk is real. I have encountered it in the past in trying to implement any number of corporate restructurings where one holdout could prevent the deal from happening. Only when one trying to holdup an action sees the downside pain to them in so doing will they come along even if begrudgingly.
The state is different, so holdout risk is more a feature than a bug. If government cannot get things done when only 51% of people want them shoved down the throats of the other 49%, that's all for the better. There can be a holdout on a jury too, but since it's the state trying to take away an accused's life, liberty, or property, we accept the wisdom of unanimity, indeed SCOTUS said the Constitution insists upon it in both Federal and now state courts too (Ramos, 2020). I think SCOTUS got the law wrong on that question as a historical and legal matter, but they got the principle right.
To "get things done" the state forces opponents to go along in circumstances where exit is costly. Bare majorities and unlimited spending and taxing powers mean that the poorest 51% can vote to expropriate and grab (excuse me, 'redistribute') what the richest 49% earn and own and subject to no cognizable limiting principle (such limits having been delegitimized and neutralized a long time ago). This is the promise the left is always eager to dangle as the war spoils reward for the electoral support it receives from its client groups and vote banks.
As an interesting historical note, note that the Constitution does not even allow supermajorities to deprive any state of its right to equal representation in the Senate without its consent, even if a single tiny state is the lone holdout opposing such a scheme of reform.
“unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And, it is not only possible but necessary to act together when we don't think alike.”
I believe that shared cultural norms are what create desirable institutions and that they are merely the embodiment of those values. If we cannot agree on the basics like whether systemic racism is a real thing or a boogeyman or whether illegal immigration is good or bad, then we are unlikely to come together in unity on basically any public policy issue. In other words, when there is a breakdown in the basic agreed upon values and principles, no institution is likely to bail us out. It will probably be captured instead.
I just got back from a trip to Northern California. The cultural norms around driving etiquette are significantly different from those here in Texas although the institutionally imposed speed limits and pedestrian safety rules are basically the same. How did that come to be? Would a new institution in Texas make driving here more enjoyable or is it the cultural norms that dictate the rules?
Driving through the south the other week, mainly but not entirely on interstates, I found that the agressive daytime drag racer(s) is not really a thing. As always, I'm inclined to blame the constant entrances and exits to the frontage roads in Texas first, but obviously, culturally, the places we drove through also still hewed to an idea of good driving that owed more to coolly going about your business than to (video games? action movies?).
The thing that worries me about Texas is that the commercial drivers - the big rig drivers - who used to be perceived as the unflappable knights of the road - are not driving so well anymore. It began to rain hard the other day - "Drive to conditions!" - and while the rest of us mostly slowed, the big rigs floored it, like they were invisible in the rain and decided this was their chance to go through Houston doing 85.
I do think that inability to read signs may also lead to a situation where people thus ignore all signs. I can see no other reason people barrel through work zones the way they do. Because that is an expensive ticket ...
However, there isn't so much visibility of DPS on Texas roads anymore ("good" my husband says) but the fact is, even if you view it as he does with a million Texas miles under his belt - they are unlikely to stop the people speeding so fast they are hard to catch, and go for the easier prey such as yourself.
I did notice, oddly, beginning in Louisiana, something I've not really seen here: the Sovereign Driver. He has a badly-lettered beat-up piece of paper where the plate should be or in the window: "In transit". Or he has a suspiciously permanent-looking printed paper where the plate should be: "Tags applied for".
Driving on the interstate is presumably this person's hobby. Why would they not get stopped? We pondered this. One suggestion was that the trooper sees that, and says to himself, I don't want to pull that guy over and have to listen to his B.S. for half an hour. So they probably leave them mostly alone.
There is no intellectual value in adopting the framing of another one of Levin's typical brazen attempts to push a peculiar and unconventional rhetorical meaning onto emotionally-compelling words that are widely understood to mean something else, just as there's little profit in getting bogged down in some philosophical semantic argument about what it 'really' means to be 'unified', which you might see too if you squint real hard.
One can argue convincingly that widespread and good-faith adherence to the traditional constitutional arrangement of political powers and social order to tame inevitable rivalries and disputes is a good way to channel political energy into constructive efforts which have positive sum results, while also blocking the destructive temptation to leveraging the power of the state to act in predatory and negative sum ways towards ones rivals, by making such predations difficult to accomplish.
But the thing about negative sum games is that they need not have negative results for all players, if the winner wins less than the lower loses, which can still be greater than what that winner would win in the positive sum scenario. In such circumstances, the likely winner is going to dump the positive game, dump the obstacles to negative games, and play the negative game.
That's the problem. There is no 'unity' without 'thinking alike' about principled commitment to the institution of the positive game, even if that means potentially leaving some money on the table and not grabbing every possible gain and advantage the moment the opportunity presents itself, which is only the anxious and misleading calm of a temporary ceasefire before the next outbreak of fighting.
Sometimes there is peace between friends born of affection and harmony. And sometimes there is peace between enemies despite plenty of enmity and acrimony, but born out of the "balance of terror" of credible threats of mutual annihilation. Levin wants a peace of the first kind. As all good people do. But actual political reality consists of enemies of the second kind, when playing nice and speaking softly doesn't work without also carrying a big stick. Levin hates the politics of both loud trash talking and big stick carrying, but he can offer no plausible alternatives to big sticks to enable the soft speaking he favors.
At this point, the only thing holding us back from Armageddon is the SCOTUS. Thomas is the GOAT. I’m still scratching my head on how Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson could argue in good faith that a “bump stock” is really an automatic weapon banned by the 1934 National Firearms Act. And, hundreds of millions actually agree with them despite the incontrovertible proof to the contrary.
Who are these deplorables that you think are so decent? Alex Jones fans? Integralists? Hamas apologists are not harmless, but neither are these people.
This Israel thing has really radicalized you. Not everything is about Israel. The world doesn't revolve around Israel. There are much larger things at stake in the world that the US needs to be mindful of.
Who are they? Just people trying to live their lives. Not active on line. Not intellectuals. They are the people you would want your kids to run into if they got lost in a strange place or their car broke down. The people who clean up after the college radicals leave their encampments and go back to their parents' mansions.
College radicals would also be nice to your kids if they got lost in a strange place. If you think that isn't true, you are in an echo chamber.
Probably you will say that the college radicals would be less nice if your kids were white or Jewish. To an extent that's true of some of them. But to at least an equal extent, Alex Jones fans would be less nice if your kids were black or Hispanic or Muslim.
Lest you think I am out of touch, I grew up in the rural Midwest and I still spend a lot of time there, and I like the people there despite not getting along with many of them politically.
Population is now a taboo subject, so Google returns us to 1999 in response to a question about Americans' preferences re family size:
"With a question that asks "What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have," Gallup has recorded dramatic changes in attitudes about family size in the United States over the last half century. When first measured by Gallup in 1936, two-thirds of Americans thought that three or more children were ideal. The average (mathematical mean) number of children preferred was 3.6. Those preferences held steady for the next three decades, through a poll conducted in 1967. Then, the next Gallup poll to ask the "ideal number of children" question, conducted in 1973, recorded a substantial change -- with preference for three or more children declining to 43% and the mean number preferred dropping to 2.8. By 1980, the figures had fallen further, to 32% favoring three or more children, and just 2.5 for the mean. U.S. opinion on this issue has been mostly stable at this level since 1980, although a significant upward trend was seen when the issue was last measured in 1997.
It is interesting to note that trends in U.S. preferences for family size are generally consistent with birth statistics over the same time period. From the end of World War II through 1967, the average number of children born to women in the United States was relatively high, ranging from 2.7 to 3.7. That fell to 1.9 by 1973 and was estimated at 2.1 for 1997."
I don't imagine that respondents to these surveys imagined that there could possibly be a subtext where, their preferences being thus well-known, the government of the United States through the eager efforts of *both* parties acting for different reasons, though perhaps equally cynical - "unity"! - would via means both legal and extralegal, deliberately subvert them - would replace the children so forgone, the restraint so shown, with an eye to what the "good" was, especially as regarded their surroundings - with immigrants, and also with relentless subsidizing of the most dysgenic among us. So that now, the only talk is of "density" and of how much of the world population we could cram into the spaces where there is now ag, or into the national parks should the GOP manage to sell them.
In fact, the same commenters who bitch about illegal immigration, turn on a dime and say that the US must not pursue any energy sources other than fossil fuels - because it will do harm to the illegal immigrants, who can't and shouldn't be asked to conserve, or pay too much for energy. They should, in effect, *be* our energy policy; and by extension our environmental policy too.
The same people who bitch about illegal immigration and talk about "how great California used to be" - say California should not be allowed to tie up so much land in open space, because that's the place where the illegal immigrants, the next billion Americans, should live.
I'm not sure what these people are hearkening back to exactly, if they want San Francisco to look like Taipei so badly.
To me, it's when the parties collude to ignore the general will, that it becomes apparent elections do, in fact, have stakes. And that who the elected are (and the electors?), trumps the Constitution.
In the early years of the American "experiment", the system seemed to work pretty well in yielding leaders. Then with Andrew Jackson, things break down for a couple decades, Polk being a bright spot. Post-Civil War the ship is righted pretty well for awhile, falling apart again with Woodrow Wilson (admittedly, his schizophrenia on entry to war was followed by an efficiency once we did). Things have been pretty erratic since then ... FDR was kind of the last gasp of the patrician, which (only) for war purposes, kinda worked out in that he equalled Churchill and Stalin in charisma if not in strategery; more than that I can't say. The history is what it is. Our performance in WW2 seems to rest just as much with the American people, the people we had to bring to the task.
Of course, I'm the rare commenter who thinks Carter was much better a president than Reagan, but it doesn't matter ... we don't seem to be choosing well since midcentury.
You are very concerned about open space and parks, and I don't think you do your cause any favors by saying things like Republicans want to sell National Parks. They often don't want to create new ones, or expand existing ones--and Trump even cut back part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument--but they are basically fine with what we have. And if it will help tourism in their area, may even favor more.
At this very moment we have a willing seller - it his in fact his desire - to expand Big Bend National Park. This should be a matter of courtesy, to get the appropriate boundary change. And land is only going to get more expensive …
Cornyn supports this, and surely has been in the Senate long enough not to be defied on this.
But one of his GOP brethren has decreed no land can be added to the national parks - this by the way is how they have achieved their present forms of which supposedly everyone “approves” - unless done exactly equal piece of federal land is sold.
So somehow the park enthusiasts - and though Texas is Red, Big Bend is part of the state religion - and the desert rats and this landowner - are supposed to also figure out how to sell a piece of an army base or something?
No, they are not so expected to.
They are expected to give up - that is the point, and it is working. How could it not? It will hold up all such measures indefinitely, no matter how much effort has gone into them.
But of course, that same guy will no doubt relax the rule to allow another unit of Emmett Till NP. Happily.
Our state legislature, meanwhile, always begins the session with some idiot proposing to sell all the state parks. It’s practically a sign of spring (or whenever the hell they meet).
We are oddly in funds now, for park expansion. Partly because contra the GOP, the state’s voters passed bonds for the purpose a year or two ago (a little late, given the run-up in land prices).
But also because another measure the voters passed, years ago - a sales tax on sporting goods dedicated entirely to parks and to wildlife, fishing, recreation, etc. - immediately developed a “loophole” exploited by all the GOP lawyers (it’s all lawyers, seems like, in the TX Lege) - and so TPWD never got the $. It was spirited away, to pay for, I dunno - social services for immigrants. All this time.
Until finally a campaign was launched to pass it with the voters all over again.
Clear will of the voters?
You bet I’m bitter about the GOP.
The Bears Ears by the way has been considered an important natural landmark since about 3 days after the first Anglos set sight on it. Even the Indians didn’t use that country much, and accounts of Utah exploration tend to center on finding just the right Indian who remembers seeing something like that.
It is true wilderness, that is its highest and best use - if Americans may be permitted to make such judgments without leftist ideological interference.
As you say, Texas Republican Senator Cornyn is even in favor of expanding Big Bend National Park (as is the area's Republican Congressman, Tony Gonzalez TX-23).
Who is "one of his GOP brethren [who] has decreed no land can be added to the national parks"?
Of Utah. At the risk of hijacking the thread, what is his argument for that? Is he just annoyed that Bears Ears NM got created without the consent of Utah's senators?
He's an ideologue who doesn't believe in the idea of open space for preservation whether of natural resources or of artifacts, unless there's enough grass to support some welfare cows.
The Mormons aren't making any Stewart Udalls anymore. Even the Udalls are not making any Stewart Udalls anymore.
Let's take school vouchers, which appear to be more popular with constituents then with legislators. Texas had to go through a grueling primary process to oust anti-voucher republicans, and they will probably pass it by the slimest margins. Is that enacting the popular will or party hard lining?
I'll start to believe in bi-partisanship when I see democrats pass universal school vouchers.
In order to do it, they had to find some oddballs e.g. in my district a thuggish trial lawyer who had never voted for the GOP in his life. It was super weird.
I don’t care about the issue - it’s Texas, prisons or schools, public or “non-profit”, they’ll build more and grift in all ways possible and somebody’s brother in law will faithfully re-tar the parking lot every year either way - and didn’t vote but the humorous result locally was that the longtime ordinary reliable GOP rep was basically punished for being pro-public school (because he lives in an affluent school district which serves both its affluent kids and its many apartment dwellers’ kids well, and which his constituents support in bond elections). He was certainly a voice of sanity on other things in a way the billboard lawyer will not be.
All for a silly sideshow. Spending on education will never go down in this state. After all, it’s responsible for a lot of jobs and hideous construction - it’s a big part of the Miracle!
“A narrow majority” = 59 votes in the Senate with Democrats representing something like 70 million people that’s Republicans. Even at today’s 50/50 Senate Democrats represent 40 million more people than Republicans.
The Senate is anti democratic by design. The filibuster makes it profoundly anti-democratic. Ending it would change the game theory of legislation for the better.
Levin disagrees and that is really the point. Democracy is 50% + 1 gets their way. Having a larger consensus means more compromise and broader agreement about proposed legislation. Which, he argues is more sustainable.
See, I think that's just status quo bias. There used to be a filibuster in the House too, but it was ended in 1891, partly to pass civil rights law. The Senate held on to it and many of those laws didn't pass. The result was 74 more years of Jim Crow.
Also the filibuster process itself has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It used to be that a filibuster required that you actually stand up and filibuster. Now it's just an email you send to the leadership on Thursday while you're at the airport waiting for your flight home.
I'd like to at least return to a time where doing the filibuster requires actual effort. If a law is so bad, stand up and say so on the Senate floor.
The modern filibuster is the way it is because of the constitutionally enshrined rules of quorum. It was made pro forma because it is much easier for the fillibusterers to hold the floor than it is for the majority to keep the Senate in session.
It doesn't matter, DJ- forcing filibusterers to actually speak doesn't work to end filibusters- you are criticizing a rule that wasn't designed to make filibusters "easier"- it was designed to not tie the Senate's business up in having one. This rule is occasionally not invoked, even today, but it never works to defeat the filibuster since the majority has to keep quorum the entire time which is harder than it is for even as few as 2 guys to hold the floor speaking. The minute a quorum isn't present, the filibusterer can force the Senate chair to adjourn for the day.
It absolutely matters. The use of the filibuster escalated dramatically in the Obama era because McConnell correct realized they could silently kill a bill without saying a word. So the headlines normalized into “Democrats fail to pass a bill in the Senate” rather than “a minority in the Senate spent days successfully to killing a bill.” Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have both done filibusters that failed.
The game theory of the Senate can change. Right now there is no incentive to negotiate on a bill. And conversely, the majority can vote yes on a bill that they know will not pass, but pretend to support it. In both cases the vote has zero cost to the Senator.
Laws can be repealed too, it’s not just about progressives passing laws. Congress grants too much power to the president in part because it’s very hard to claw it back.
“Instead, if a narrow majority is able to force through a policy change, then an election becomes an apocalyptic battle….. They see nothing wrong with Obamacare passing with a narrow majority.”
The comment on obamacare perplexes me. at the time, The democrats had trifecta control of the federal government and super majorities in both houses of congress. how does that fit the definition of narrow?
Perhaps levin means governing through consensus? in other words, regardless of how much power one political tribe has at one time, as a matter of prudence they shouldn’t pass legislation unless they have buy-in from the other tribe. but who decides which tribe and how much buy in you need?
Let’s imagine republicans get trifecta control of the federal government in the next election with 55 seats in the senate. if the republicans manage to get 5 senate democrats to break a filibuster and pass immigration legislation despite vociferous and unified opposition from dems in the house, was passing this law with a narrow or large majority, governing via consensus or defeating your opponent? or is all of the above?
i am unsure how to model what levin is proposing based on your description.
I don't want to oversimplify history, but they didn't get a trifecta during a recession and financial crisis to add a huge new entitlement program. "In a 2010 poll, 62% of respondents said they thought ACA would "increase the amount of money they personally spend on health care", 56% said the bill "gives the government too much involvement in health care", and 19% said they thought they and their families would be better off with the legislation."
Part of the reason its popularity has increased over time is because all of the most unpopular items that were supposedly going to constrain costs were allowed to be stripped out or never implemented.
The unpopular stuff was what would have made it even remotely fiscally sustainable. Programs are more popular when beneficiaries don't have to pay for them.
The trouble is that there is already a teachers-union constituency that benefits from the status quo, will be pissed off if its taken away, and will fight like hell to keep it that way, that is, to use their incumbent advantages to rent-seek to prevent the emergence of a rival constituency. Nobody wants their own position and interests to be checked and balanced.
A supermajority is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level of support which is greater than a simple majority. The threshold is arbitrary. why isn’t 57 or 60 senators a super majority? whatever number is picked, someone else can counter that’s not “really” super majority because you didn’t clear their threshold. now the subtext of course is that on the merits the losers hate losing and want to delegitimize the process that resulted in them losing.
I am unsure what people are arguing for here. what are the governing principles here? some other commenters have suggested that the issue is that politicians lied and obamacare was unpopular at the time and the only reason it’s popular now is because the law was amended to remove the unpopular cost control parts.
so are the governing principles:
1. don’t pass laws without a super majority of the legislature where the minority who hates the legislation determines what is a valid super majority threshold
2. don’t pass laws that national opinion polls say are unpopular
3. don’t amend laws to make them popular
4. no laws should be passed if a politician lies or is a demagogue about the lie
The norm used to be that major legislation required some level of bipartisan support. It was not "elect more than X Senators of your party and you can do what you want."
well again I am not sure what that means nor how that helps in a polarized electorate.
if obamacare got one republican vote in either the house or senate would that make it bipartisan or would republicans and conservatives deem this as a profound betrayal and seek to primary them? there are a couple independents in both houses. now these independents are ideologically speaking easily classified - no one is mistaking lisa murkowski as a liberal. but if either primary party got the vote of one person that didn’t have have an R or D after their name then is that bipartisanship?
or does there need to be a certain of votes from the other party? if so how many? or is it bipartisanship if and only if the heads of each party support a law and whip for votes?
historically in the united states a variety of bipartisanship has ebbed and flowed based on how polarized the voting public was on the issues of the day. and bipartisanship can result in horrifically terrible laws as well as good ones. i see it more as a mechanical consequence of how people vote and not a goal in itself.
now there’s another interesting argument i’ve seen that says we do bipartisanship all the time but it’s like fight club because if you talk about it in public tribalism will polarize it instantly: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret
so i don’t really get what people mean when they say the word bipartisanship, how that could be a norm as opposed to a boring fact, nor whether that leads to better or worse policy outcomes.
Note that in the one election where the ACA was really the dominant issue, Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the race for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy. This cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, forcing them to fall back on the budget-reconciliation process to pass the ACA. It also served as a signal that even in a progressive state like Massachusetts, the measure didn't appear to have the support of a majority of the public, so was unlikely to be favored by a majority of the US population.
And how many Democrats in Congress supported the ACA because it accorded with their own beliefs on health care, and how many because they feared being shot down in their party's next primary if they voted against it? The partisan-primary system gives the more radical wings of both parties undue power in Congress, and I for one would be delighted to see it replaced by an Alaska-style system with a jungle primary followed by a multi-candidate ranked-choice election.
"The democrats had ... super majorities in both houses of congress. how does that fit the definition of narrow?" The democrats had simple - not super - majorities in Congress, which is one reason they needed to use the fig leaf of budget reconciliation as the means for passing ACA. They would not have been able to overcome opposition to the bill in the usual order of things. (That said, I think ACA has worked reasonably well in the large given the circumstances, if imperfectly and despite a rocky start.)
Over a century ago the old progressives already dismissed the debates of the 1780s as a war between obsolete ignorances and nonsensical absurdities - perhaps "well-meaning" at best and much like they looked at the passionate theological arguments between protestant sects a century prior to that - but at least the public intellectuals of the early 1900s wrote in such a manner as to reveal a shared familiarity with the content of those arguments, even as even way back then the elites would roll their eyes at anyone who spoke in a manner indicating they still took those old postions seriously. I would be surprised to learn that even 0.1% of educated Americans today have read through the federalist papers, let alone the anti-federalist papers too, about as many as could explain the core doctrinal differences between the Presbyterians and Methodists. In a way, the fact that practically no one reads it makes it even easier for them to dismiss it and to be so smugly confident that it is all terrible stuff from the evil past that one shouldn't even bother with. To the progressives, the past is a foreign country ... with which we are at war. Always have been, always will be.
Levin is not so much beating a dead horse - which is foolish but forgivable - as trying to ride it into battle - which is completely out of touch with reality. If you saw someone trying to perform a cavalry charge with a colt's corpse it wouldn't raise their reputation in your eyes for them to accurately argue that - were the horse still living - it would lead one to glorious victory. That's true, but the thing is, it's not alive, and you can't get back there from here. The love is gone. The old religion of the old constitution - which did once actually thrive for a time in a society that had fidelity to it as its central organizing principle and semi-mythological narrative of ethnogenesis - is dead and cannot be reincarnated in a culture with a century of post-constitutional and anti-costitutional water under the bridge.
Re your exerpt from Galston: reigning in Federal agencies is not an expansion of executive power. Good or bad, it is a reshuffling of executive power to bring it back under democratic control and in to line with the Constitution.
Super majorities of 2/3 should have been enshrined in the Constitution itself at the level of Congressional legislation right from the start. The people who wrote it misjudged the strength The of Bill of Rights. What we actually got was the federal government chipping away relentlessly at the Bill of Rights and all three articles of the constitution using both occasional majorities in Congress and the growth of the now untouchable administrative state- and doing so for 230 years. If it doesn't stop, it will lead to a violent rupture or Orwell will turn out to have just been Cassandra all along.
Yep "holdup" risk is real. I have encountered it in the past in trying to implement any number of corporate restructurings where one holdout could prevent the deal from happening. Only when one trying to holdup an action sees the downside pain to them in so doing will they come along even if begrudgingly.
The state is different, so holdout risk is more a feature than a bug. If government cannot get things done when only 51% of people want them shoved down the throats of the other 49%, that's all for the better. There can be a holdout on a jury too, but since it's the state trying to take away an accused's life, liberty, or property, we accept the wisdom of unanimity, indeed SCOTUS said the Constitution insists upon it in both Federal and now state courts too (Ramos, 2020). I think SCOTUS got the law wrong on that question as a historical and legal matter, but they got the principle right.
To "get things done" the state forces opponents to go along in circumstances where exit is costly. Bare majorities and unlimited spending and taxing powers mean that the poorest 51% can vote to expropriate and grab (excuse me, 'redistribute') what the richest 49% earn and own and subject to no cognizable limiting principle (such limits having been delegitimized and neutralized a long time ago). This is the promise the left is always eager to dangle as the war spoils reward for the electoral support it receives from its client groups and vote banks.
As an interesting historical note, note that the Constitution does not even allow supermajorities to deprive any state of its right to equal representation in the Senate without its consent, even if a single tiny state is the lone holdout opposing such a scheme of reform.
“unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And, it is not only possible but necessary to act together when we don't think alike.”
I believe that shared cultural norms are what create desirable institutions and that they are merely the embodiment of those values. If we cannot agree on the basics like whether systemic racism is a real thing or a boogeyman or whether illegal immigration is good or bad, then we are unlikely to come together in unity on basically any public policy issue. In other words, when there is a breakdown in the basic agreed upon values and principles, no institution is likely to bail us out. It will probably be captured instead.
I just got back from a trip to Northern California. The cultural norms around driving etiquette are significantly different from those here in Texas although the institutionally imposed speed limits and pedestrian safety rules are basically the same. How did that come to be? Would a new institution in Texas make driving here more enjoyable or is it the cultural norms that dictate the rules?
Driving through the south the other week, mainly but not entirely on interstates, I found that the agressive daytime drag racer(s) is not really a thing. As always, I'm inclined to blame the constant entrances and exits to the frontage roads in Texas first, but obviously, culturally, the places we drove through also still hewed to an idea of good driving that owed more to coolly going about your business than to (video games? action movies?).
The thing that worries me about Texas is that the commercial drivers - the big rig drivers - who used to be perceived as the unflappable knights of the road - are not driving so well anymore. It began to rain hard the other day - "Drive to conditions!" - and while the rest of us mostly slowed, the big rigs floored it, like they were invisible in the rain and decided this was their chance to go through Houston doing 85.
I do think that inability to read signs may also lead to a situation where people thus ignore all signs. I can see no other reason people barrel through work zones the way they do. Because that is an expensive ticket ...
However, there isn't so much visibility of DPS on Texas roads anymore ("good" my husband says) but the fact is, even if you view it as he does with a million Texas miles under his belt - they are unlikely to stop the people speeding so fast they are hard to catch, and go for the easier prey such as yourself.
I did notice, oddly, beginning in Louisiana, something I've not really seen here: the Sovereign Driver. He has a badly-lettered beat-up piece of paper where the plate should be or in the window: "In transit". Or he has a suspiciously permanent-looking printed paper where the plate should be: "Tags applied for".
Driving on the interstate is presumably this person's hobby. Why would they not get stopped? We pondered this. One suggestion was that the trooper sees that, and says to himself, I don't want to pull that guy over and have to listen to his B.S. for half an hour. So they probably leave them mostly alone.
There is no intellectual value in adopting the framing of another one of Levin's typical brazen attempts to push a peculiar and unconventional rhetorical meaning onto emotionally-compelling words that are widely understood to mean something else, just as there's little profit in getting bogged down in some philosophical semantic argument about what it 'really' means to be 'unified', which you might see too if you squint real hard.
One can argue convincingly that widespread and good-faith adherence to the traditional constitutional arrangement of political powers and social order to tame inevitable rivalries and disputes is a good way to channel political energy into constructive efforts which have positive sum results, while also blocking the destructive temptation to leveraging the power of the state to act in predatory and negative sum ways towards ones rivals, by making such predations difficult to accomplish.
But the thing about negative sum games is that they need not have negative results for all players, if the winner wins less than the lower loses, which can still be greater than what that winner would win in the positive sum scenario. In such circumstances, the likely winner is going to dump the positive game, dump the obstacles to negative games, and play the negative game.
That's the problem. There is no 'unity' without 'thinking alike' about principled commitment to the institution of the positive game, even if that means potentially leaving some money on the table and not grabbing every possible gain and advantage the moment the opportunity presents itself, which is only the anxious and misleading calm of a temporary ceasefire before the next outbreak of fighting.
Sometimes there is peace between friends born of affection and harmony. And sometimes there is peace between enemies despite plenty of enmity and acrimony, but born out of the "balance of terror" of credible threats of mutual annihilation. Levin wants a peace of the first kind. As all good people do. But actual political reality consists of enemies of the second kind, when playing nice and speaking softly doesn't work without also carrying a big stick. Levin hates the politics of both loud trash talking and big stick carrying, but he can offer no plausible alternatives to big sticks to enable the soft speaking he favors.
At this point, the only thing holding us back from Armageddon is the SCOTUS. Thomas is the GOAT. I’m still scratching my head on how Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson could argue in good faith that a “bump stock” is really an automatic weapon banned by the 1934 National Firearms Act. And, hundreds of millions actually agree with them despite the incontrovertible proof to the contrary.
Who are these deplorables that you think are so decent? Alex Jones fans? Integralists? Hamas apologists are not harmless, but neither are these people.
This Israel thing has really radicalized you. Not everything is about Israel. The world doesn't revolve around Israel. There are much larger things at stake in the world that the US needs to be mindful of.
Who are they? Just people trying to live their lives. Not active on line. Not intellectuals. They are the people you would want your kids to run into if they got lost in a strange place or their car broke down. The people who clean up after the college radicals leave their encampments and go back to their parents' mansions.
College radicals would also be nice to your kids if they got lost in a strange place. If you think that isn't true, you are in an echo chamber.
Probably you will say that the college radicals would be less nice if your kids were white or Jewish. To an extent that's true of some of them. But to at least an equal extent, Alex Jones fans would be less nice if your kids were black or Hispanic or Muslim.
Lest you think I am out of touch, I grew up in the rural Midwest and I still spend a lot of time there, and I like the people there despite not getting along with many of them politically.
Population is now a taboo subject, so Google returns us to 1999 in response to a question about Americans' preferences re family size:
"With a question that asks "What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have," Gallup has recorded dramatic changes in attitudes about family size in the United States over the last half century. When first measured by Gallup in 1936, two-thirds of Americans thought that three or more children were ideal. The average (mathematical mean) number of children preferred was 3.6. Those preferences held steady for the next three decades, through a poll conducted in 1967. Then, the next Gallup poll to ask the "ideal number of children" question, conducted in 1973, recorded a substantial change -- with preference for three or more children declining to 43% and the mean number preferred dropping to 2.8. By 1980, the figures had fallen further, to 32% favoring three or more children, and just 2.5 for the mean. U.S. opinion on this issue has been mostly stable at this level since 1980, although a significant upward trend was seen when the issue was last measured in 1997.
It is interesting to note that trends in U.S. preferences for family size are generally consistent with birth statistics over the same time period. From the end of World War II through 1967, the average number of children born to women in the United States was relatively high, ranging from 2.7 to 3.7. That fell to 1.9 by 1973 and was estimated at 2.1 for 1997."
I don't imagine that respondents to these surveys imagined that there could possibly be a subtext where, their preferences being thus well-known, the government of the United States through the eager efforts of *both* parties acting for different reasons, though perhaps equally cynical - "unity"! - would via means both legal and extralegal, deliberately subvert them - would replace the children so forgone, the restraint so shown, with an eye to what the "good" was, especially as regarded their surroundings - with immigrants, and also with relentless subsidizing of the most dysgenic among us. So that now, the only talk is of "density" and of how much of the world population we could cram into the spaces where there is now ag, or into the national parks should the GOP manage to sell them.
In fact, the same commenters who bitch about illegal immigration, turn on a dime and say that the US must not pursue any energy sources other than fossil fuels - because it will do harm to the illegal immigrants, who can't and shouldn't be asked to conserve, or pay too much for energy. They should, in effect, *be* our energy policy; and by extension our environmental policy too.
The same people who bitch about illegal immigration and talk about "how great California used to be" - say California should not be allowed to tie up so much land in open space, because that's the place where the illegal immigrants, the next billion Americans, should live.
I'm not sure what these people are hearkening back to exactly, if they want San Francisco to look like Taipei so badly.
To me, it's when the parties collude to ignore the general will, that it becomes apparent elections do, in fact, have stakes. And that who the elected are (and the electors?), trumps the Constitution.
In the early years of the American "experiment", the system seemed to work pretty well in yielding leaders. Then with Andrew Jackson, things break down for a couple decades, Polk being a bright spot. Post-Civil War the ship is righted pretty well for awhile, falling apart again with Woodrow Wilson (admittedly, his schizophrenia on entry to war was followed by an efficiency once we did). Things have been pretty erratic since then ... FDR was kind of the last gasp of the patrician, which (only) for war purposes, kinda worked out in that he equalled Churchill and Stalin in charisma if not in strategery; more than that I can't say. The history is what it is. Our performance in WW2 seems to rest just as much with the American people, the people we had to bring to the task.
Of course, I'm the rare commenter who thinks Carter was much better a president than Reagan, but it doesn't matter ... we don't seem to be choosing well since midcentury.
You are very concerned about open space and parks, and I don't think you do your cause any favors by saying things like Republicans want to sell National Parks. They often don't want to create new ones, or expand existing ones--and Trump even cut back part of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument--but they are basically fine with what we have. And if it will help tourism in their area, may even favor more.
At this very moment we have a willing seller - it his in fact his desire - to expand Big Bend National Park. This should be a matter of courtesy, to get the appropriate boundary change. And land is only going to get more expensive …
Cornyn supports this, and surely has been in the Senate long enough not to be defied on this.
But one of his GOP brethren has decreed no land can be added to the national parks - this by the way is how they have achieved their present forms of which supposedly everyone “approves” - unless done exactly equal piece of federal land is sold.
So somehow the park enthusiasts - and though Texas is Red, Big Bend is part of the state religion - and the desert rats and this landowner - are supposed to also figure out how to sell a piece of an army base or something?
No, they are not so expected to.
They are expected to give up - that is the point, and it is working. How could it not? It will hold up all such measures indefinitely, no matter how much effort has gone into them.
But of course, that same guy will no doubt relax the rule to allow another unit of Emmett Till NP. Happily.
Our state legislature, meanwhile, always begins the session with some idiot proposing to sell all the state parks. It’s practically a sign of spring (or whenever the hell they meet).
We are oddly in funds now, for park expansion. Partly because contra the GOP, the state’s voters passed bonds for the purpose a year or two ago (a little late, given the run-up in land prices).
But also because another measure the voters passed, years ago - a sales tax on sporting goods dedicated entirely to parks and to wildlife, fishing, recreation, etc. - immediately developed a “loophole” exploited by all the GOP lawyers (it’s all lawyers, seems like, in the TX Lege) - and so TPWD never got the $. It was spirited away, to pay for, I dunno - social services for immigrants. All this time.
Until finally a campaign was launched to pass it with the voters all over again.
Clear will of the voters?
You bet I’m bitter about the GOP.
The Bears Ears by the way has been considered an important natural landmark since about 3 days after the first Anglos set sight on it. Even the Indians didn’t use that country much, and accounts of Utah exploration tend to center on finding just the right Indian who remembers seeing something like that.
It is true wilderness, that is its highest and best use - if Americans may be permitted to make such judgments without leftist ideological interference.
As you say, Texas Republican Senator Cornyn is even in favor of expanding Big Bend National Park (as is the area's Republican Congressman, Tony Gonzalez TX-23).
Who is "one of his GOP brethren [who] has decreed no land can be added to the national parks"?
That would be Senator Mike Lee.
Of Utah. At the risk of hijacking the thread, what is his argument for that? Is he just annoyed that Bears Ears NM got created without the consent of Utah's senators?
He's an ideologue who doesn't believe in the idea of open space for preservation whether of natural resources or of artifacts, unless there's enough grass to support some welfare cows.
The Mormons aren't making any Stewart Udalls anymore. Even the Udalls are not making any Stewart Udalls anymore.
TL; DR - beware "unity" if each "side" is equally bad.
Let's take school vouchers, which appear to be more popular with constituents then with legislators. Texas had to go through a grueling primary process to oust anti-voucher republicans, and they will probably pass it by the slimest margins. Is that enacting the popular will or party hard lining?
I'll start to believe in bi-partisanship when I see democrats pass universal school vouchers.
In order to do it, they had to find some oddballs e.g. in my district a thuggish trial lawyer who had never voted for the GOP in his life. It was super weird.
I don’t care about the issue - it’s Texas, prisons or schools, public or “non-profit”, they’ll build more and grift in all ways possible and somebody’s brother in law will faithfully re-tar the parking lot every year either way - and didn’t vote but the humorous result locally was that the longtime ordinary reliable GOP rep was basically punished for being pro-public school (because he lives in an affluent school district which serves both its affluent kids and its many apartment dwellers’ kids well, and which his constituents support in bond elections). He was certainly a voice of sanity on other things in a way the billboard lawyer will not be.
All for a silly sideshow. Spending on education will never go down in this state. After all, it’s responsible for a lot of jobs and hideous construction - it’s a big part of the Miracle!
Arnold
You might enjoy the review of Charles Maier’s book “the project state and its rivals’ by W. A. Hay on ‘Law and Liberty’ today.
His idea that modernity has replaced past religious feelings with the political state.
Interesting
Thanks
Clay
For those who want to pursue this subject a bit further (short of reading the book), the Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Yuval Levin, by Bart Swaim, this past weekend. The URL is here (pay wall): https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-constitution-reconcile-us-history-politics-book-ad244e1e?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1
“A narrow majority” = 59 votes in the Senate with Democrats representing something like 70 million people that’s Republicans. Even at today’s 50/50 Senate Democrats represent 40 million more people than Republicans.
The Senate is anti democratic by design. The filibuster makes it profoundly anti-democratic. Ending it would change the game theory of legislation for the better.
Levin disagrees and that is really the point. Democracy is 50% + 1 gets their way. Having a larger consensus means more compromise and broader agreement about proposed legislation. Which, he argues is more sustainable.
See, I think that's just status quo bias. There used to be a filibuster in the House too, but it was ended in 1891, partly to pass civil rights law. The Senate held on to it and many of those laws didn't pass. The result was 74 more years of Jim Crow.
Also the filibuster process itself has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It used to be that a filibuster required that you actually stand up and filibuster. Now it's just an email you send to the leadership on Thursday while you're at the airport waiting for your flight home.
I'd like to at least return to a time where doing the filibuster requires actual effort. If a law is so bad, stand up and say so on the Senate floor.
The modern filibuster is the way it is because of the constitutionally enshrined rules of quorum. It was made pro forma because it is much easier for the fillibusterers to hold the floor than it is for the majority to keep the Senate in session.
The rules were changed in 1975. They can change again.
It doesn't matter, DJ- forcing filibusterers to actually speak doesn't work to end filibusters- you are criticizing a rule that wasn't designed to make filibusters "easier"- it was designed to not tie the Senate's business up in having one. This rule is occasionally not invoked, even today, but it never works to defeat the filibuster since the majority has to keep quorum the entire time which is harder than it is for even as few as 2 guys to hold the floor speaking. The minute a quorum isn't present, the filibusterer can force the Senate chair to adjourn for the day.
It absolutely matters. The use of the filibuster escalated dramatically in the Obama era because McConnell correct realized they could silently kill a bill without saying a word. So the headlines normalized into “Democrats fail to pass a bill in the Senate” rather than “a minority in the Senate spent days successfully to killing a bill.” Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have both done filibusters that failed.
The game theory of the Senate can change. Right now there is no incentive to negotiate on a bill. And conversely, the majority can vote yes on a bill that they know will not pass, but pretend to support it. In both cases the vote has zero cost to the Senator.
Laws can be repealed too, it’s not just about progressives passing laws. Congress grants too much power to the president in part because it’s very hard to claw it back.
I’m not sufficiently political to seek to know about that stuff, but found your explanation succinct and convincing. Thx.
“Instead, if a narrow majority is able to force through a policy change, then an election becomes an apocalyptic battle….. They see nothing wrong with Obamacare passing with a narrow majority.”
The comment on obamacare perplexes me. at the time, The democrats had trifecta control of the federal government and super majorities in both houses of congress. how does that fit the definition of narrow?
Perhaps levin means governing through consensus? in other words, regardless of how much power one political tribe has at one time, as a matter of prudence they shouldn’t pass legislation unless they have buy-in from the other tribe. but who decides which tribe and how much buy in you need?
Let’s imagine republicans get trifecta control of the federal government in the next election with 55 seats in the senate. if the republicans manage to get 5 senate democrats to break a filibuster and pass immigration legislation despite vociferous and unified opposition from dems in the house, was passing this law with a narrow or large majority, governing via consensus or defeating your opponent? or is all of the above?
i am unsure how to model what levin is proposing based on your description.
I don't want to oversimplify history, but they didn't get a trifecta during a recession and financial crisis to add a huge new entitlement program. "In a 2010 poll, 62% of respondents said they thought ACA would "increase the amount of money they personally spend on health care", 56% said the bill "gives the government too much involvement in health care", and 19% said they thought they and their families would be better off with the legislation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act#Public_opinion
Part of the reason its popularity has increased over time is because all of the most unpopular items that were supposedly going to constrain costs were allowed to be stripped out or never implemented.
The unpopular stuff was what would have made it even remotely fiscally sustainable. Programs are more popular when beneficiaries don't have to pay for them.
The lesson of the ACA is that if you want something you pass it and create a constituency that will be pissed off if its taken away.
This is how the GOP should approach school vouchers. Once a substantial group of parents are using them they will fight like hell to keep them.
The trouble is that there is already a teachers-union constituency that benefits from the status quo, will be pissed off if its taken away, and will fight like hell to keep it that way, that is, to use their incumbent advantages to rent-seek to prevent the emergence of a rival constituency. Nobody wants their own position and interests to be checked and balanced.
So you call 57 Senators a "super majority"
A supermajority is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level of support which is greater than a simple majority. The threshold is arbitrary. why isn’t 57 or 60 senators a super majority? whatever number is picked, someone else can counter that’s not “really” super majority because you didn’t clear their threshold. now the subtext of course is that on the merits the losers hate losing and want to delegitimize the process that resulted in them losing.
I am unsure what people are arguing for here. what are the governing principles here? some other commenters have suggested that the issue is that politicians lied and obamacare was unpopular at the time and the only reason it’s popular now is because the law was amended to remove the unpopular cost control parts.
so are the governing principles:
1. don’t pass laws without a super majority of the legislature where the minority who hates the legislation determines what is a valid super majority threshold
2. don’t pass laws that national opinion polls say are unpopular
3. don’t amend laws to make them popular
4. no laws should be passed if a politician lies or is a demagogue about the lie
The norm used to be that major legislation required some level of bipartisan support. It was not "elect more than X Senators of your party and you can do what you want."
well again I am not sure what that means nor how that helps in a polarized electorate.
if obamacare got one republican vote in either the house or senate would that make it bipartisan or would republicans and conservatives deem this as a profound betrayal and seek to primary them? there are a couple independents in both houses. now these independents are ideologically speaking easily classified - no one is mistaking lisa murkowski as a liberal. but if either primary party got the vote of one person that didn’t have have an R or D after their name then is that bipartisanship?
or does there need to be a certain of votes from the other party? if so how many? or is it bipartisanship if and only if the heads of each party support a law and whip for votes?
historically in the united states a variety of bipartisanship has ebbed and flowed based on how polarized the voting public was on the issues of the day. and bipartisanship can result in horrifically terrible laws as well as good ones. i see it more as a mechanical consequence of how people vote and not a goal in itself.
now there’s another interesting argument i’ve seen that says we do bipartisanship all the time but it’s like fight club because if you talk about it in public tribalism will polarize it instantly: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret
so i don’t really get what people mean when they say the word bipartisanship, how that could be a norm as opposed to a boring fact, nor whether that leads to better or worse policy outcomes.
Note that in the one election where the ACA was really the dominant issue, Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the race for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy. This cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, forcing them to fall back on the budget-reconciliation process to pass the ACA. It also served as a signal that even in a progressive state like Massachusetts, the measure didn't appear to have the support of a majority of the public, so was unlikely to be favored by a majority of the US population.
And how many Democrats in Congress supported the ACA because it accorded with their own beliefs on health care, and how many because they feared being shot down in their party's next primary if they voted against it? The partisan-primary system gives the more radical wings of both parties undue power in Congress, and I for one would be delighted to see it replaced by an Alaska-style system with a jungle primary followed by a multi-candidate ranked-choice election.
"The democrats had ... super majorities in both houses of congress. how does that fit the definition of narrow?" The democrats had simple - not super - majorities in Congress, which is one reason they needed to use the fig leaf of budget reconciliation as the means for passing ACA. They would not have been able to overcome opposition to the bill in the usual order of things. (That said, I think ACA has worked reasonably well in the large given the circumstances, if imperfectly and despite a rocky start.)
Over a century ago the old progressives already dismissed the debates of the 1780s as a war between obsolete ignorances and nonsensical absurdities - perhaps "well-meaning" at best and much like they looked at the passionate theological arguments between protestant sects a century prior to that - but at least the public intellectuals of the early 1900s wrote in such a manner as to reveal a shared familiarity with the content of those arguments, even as even way back then the elites would roll their eyes at anyone who spoke in a manner indicating they still took those old postions seriously. I would be surprised to learn that even 0.1% of educated Americans today have read through the federalist papers, let alone the anti-federalist papers too, about as many as could explain the core doctrinal differences between the Presbyterians and Methodists. In a way, the fact that practically no one reads it makes it even easier for them to dismiss it and to be so smugly confident that it is all terrible stuff from the evil past that one shouldn't even bother with. To the progressives, the past is a foreign country ... with which we are at war. Always have been, always will be.
Levin is not so much beating a dead horse - which is foolish but forgivable - as trying to ride it into battle - which is completely out of touch with reality. If you saw someone trying to perform a cavalry charge with a colt's corpse it wouldn't raise their reputation in your eyes for them to accurately argue that - were the horse still living - it would lead one to glorious victory. That's true, but the thing is, it's not alive, and you can't get back there from here. The love is gone. The old religion of the old constitution - which did once actually thrive for a time in a society that had fidelity to it as its central organizing principle and semi-mythological narrative of ethnogenesis - is dead and cannot be reincarnated in a culture with a century of post-constitutional and anti-costitutional water under the bridge.