Slow and Steady Wins the Race
The Economist notices that Matt Yglesias is against the United States Senate, while Ezra Klein is losing faith in the American system of government:
Something might get done. And if that something that gets done extends health-care coverage to 40 million people who don’t now have it, that will be a big deal, and a big improvement in the lives of many, many Americans. It’s important for people who get good health care and have the luxury of seeing this as an intellectual and political project to keep that in mind.
But whatever gets done will be much too expensive because the political system is very afraid of harming any of the relevant industries. Taibbi is right that this, like climate change, is a litmus test for our government. Both are serious, foreseeable and solvable threats to our society. One threatens to bankrupt the country. The other threatens irreversible damage to the planet we live on. Responding to such threats is the test of a political system. And our system will fail it. We will not avert catastrophic climate change. We will not protect ourselves from health-care inflation.
All this helps me to clarify how my idea of government differs from theirs. The Founders designed the United States government to safeguard basic freedoms and disperse power as a hedge against tyranny. The ensuing 200+ years is a compelling argument that their priorities were wisely chosen. Apparently, Ezra judges governmental frameworks by another metric — their ability to respond to controversial long term threats long before they come to fruition. A political system that doesn’t take immediate action against these kinds of threats is a failure by the litmus test he suggests.
I reject that litmus test as a measure of a political system — it is impossible to guarantee that long term problems with be quickly solved without concentrating power in dangerous ways.
What is most striking is the short memory of progressive bloggers on these matters. Isn’t Social Security a “serious, foreseeable and solvable” threat to America’s fiscal health? Didn’t President George W. Bush campaign on its privatization? Wasn’t he unable to make that happen even at the height of his post-9/11 popularity, with a complacent media and a friendly Congress? And don’t progressives regard that as a good thing? What about Ronald Reagan, and his promise to shrink government? Despite two easy wins at the polls, he never managed to eliminate the Department of Education, or to radically shrink the bureaucracy.
The United States government is built to resist radical changes in policy. That frustrates both political parties and the sundry ideologies they encompass at various times, but it’s served our nation rather well during its history, and the idea that we ought to deem the approach a failure due to Barack Obama’s inability to pass sweeping health care reform or climate change legislation is short-sighted, to say the least.
Yup, ‘zactly right.
The Framers did the best they could to resolve the old tension between the aristoi and the commoners.
We live in a democratic meritocracy.
Anyone can BE president, but inshallah not everyone will.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 07:14 PM · #
I think americans elect the best possible president for the slice of spacetime they are operating in.
Unfortunately, we needed an entirely different kind of president then we elected before 911 to deal with the aftermath.
Perhaps we could have a nod to Klein and instantiate a sort of break-the-glass-if-terrorist-and-or-extraterrestrial-attack law and elect a sort of auxiliary president in an emergency?
lol
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 07:20 PM · #
And Conor, this is an excellent point.
I give you props.
What the framers built in was resilience.
One of my favorite words.
— matoko_chan · Jul 29, 07:40 PM · #
Connor, did eliminating the Department of Education ever poll at 70%? 50%? I don’t know, but I’m going to guess no. The point they’re making is that a public health care option is very popular and has been for some time and that our system has kept this popular idea from coming to fruition.
— Simon · Jul 29, 08:14 PM · #
This post would be a lot more convincing if Matt and Ezra hadn’t already addressed Conor’s main counterexample.
In short: no, Social Security wouldn’t have been privatized had the filibuster been abolished, it has certainly never been a “‘serious, foreseeable and solvable’ threat to America’s fiscal health”, and enhancing the democratic responsiveness of the Senate is a good thing.
I’d also add that anyone who thinks the forced restraint of the Constitution cuts evenly along ideological grounds is fooling themselves. The large, sweeping social reforms it tends to block are overwhelmingly part of progressive policy agendas.
— Dylan Matthews · Jul 29, 08:40 PM · #
“The point they’re making is that a public health care option is very popular and has been for some time and that our system has kept this popular idea from coming to fruition.”
There are lots of things that are popular, even popular for long periods of time. That doesn’t mean they should be enshrined in law.
I’m not sure about Klein, but having read Yglesias wankin’ away on this subject for a while, he seems to be motivated by a desire to see more European-style policy results in the U.S. He thinks those results were produced by European-style government institutions. So, he thinks if the U.S. had a parliamentary system, his preferred policy results would occur. It’s never quite occured to him that an American parliament might look a heck of a lot more like what they’ve got in India than anything in Europe (no offense to any Indians out there).
Mike
— MBunge · Jul 29, 08:42 PM · #
Poor chaps. I remember how I felt, when I found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
Maybe now’s the time for them to read Polar Express.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 29, 08:47 PM · #
The large, sweeping social reforms it tends to block are overwhelmingly part of progressive policy agendas.
I think they said something about distrusting the Emo-Imagination Machine in The Federalist Papers.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 29, 08:51 PM · #
It seems like there’s a mismatch between your motivating examples and the cases at hand. You’re right that we want to have mechanisms in place to prevent rapid and/or radical changes to the liberties we enjoy. That is not necessarily the same as preventing rapid changes to economic policies. For all that progressives like Matt and Ezra would oppose change to social security, they don’t think that such a change would be on a par with restricting freedom of speech, or other civil liberties (that’s in addition to the point that social security reform didn’t have much of a chance to begin with).
Obviously, one might wonder whether it’s possible to create a system where majorities have the power to make rapid changes to economic policy without stalling, but not to more fundamental liberties. I think it’s a valid concern.
However, one might wonder how many cases there are of procedural rules like the filibuster really serving to protect our liberties. The patriot act wasn’t filibustered, it was passed by super majority, because of widespread fear. I realize that’s one example, but it strikes me as characteristic.
— Justin · Jul 29, 09:22 PM · #
Yglesias and Klein are just impatient because they’re used to getting things they want immediately by circumventing the legislative process through the courts.
We shouldn’t be surprised by their attitude. As progressives they really have disdain for the Constitution and seem not to make the connection between it and this country’s 200 years of unparalleled success. They have someone of like mind in the White House and certainly hoped that he would change this country—the Constitution be damned.
— jd · Jul 29, 09:25 PM · #
If there ever was a better argument for the conservative mindset this would be it. Yes, we should be VERY circumspect about large and sudden change, unintended consequences and all.
Personally, I believe we need to make significant changes to our healthcare “system” and I have to note that “good” conservatives in Britain would never consider eliminating their National Health Service. Having said all that, It’s good to intensely wrestle over these issues. (And I’ll probably be generally satisfied with the imperfect system that comes out of doing “something” or doing nothing. )
“Do something Damn it!!” will generally be a more “powerful” argument than “Hold on a second…”
— C3 · Jul 29, 10:43 PM · #
Wasn’t he unable to make that happen even at the height of his post-9/11 popularity, with a complacent media and a friendly Congress?
This is a little misleading. Social Security reform didn’t fail because of the filibuster, which is what Yglesias, at least, is opposed to. It failed because of an insufficient number of Republican Senators and Congressman backing it.
What’s more, confusing fiduciary responsibility with moral responsibility is a category error. Health care is in desperate need of reform because millions of people are suffering, some of them incredibly so, because of they lack adequate health care access due to poverty, joblessness or insufficient employment. That is a crisis. I know that conservatives have declared that it is unSerious to mention such things, but it is the truth.
or to radically shrink the bureaucracy.
I’m not aware of a genuine attempt he ever made to radically shrink the bureaucracy, actually.
— Freddie · Jul 29, 10:50 PM · #
In a democracy, though, that’s kind of exactly what it does mean. Shouldn’t the law of the land represent the overwhelmingly popular and enduring consensus on an issue, at least to some degree? Otherwise what was the point of having representative government in the first place? Why not just have kept the system of presumably-benevolent rulers ruling as they saw fit? Or why even have laws at all?
— Chet · Jul 29, 11:57 PM · #
But the filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. The Constitution specifies that bills in the Senate be passed by simple majority. The requirement that they be passed by supermajority is Senate bylaw, not the Constitutional requirement.
— Chet · Jul 29, 11:59 PM · #
Ah yes, progressives have disdain for the Constitution – unlike conservatives, who passed laws to snoop in our library records and indefinitely jail people without trial or recourse to the great writ, and who so desperately wanted to amend the First Amendment so as to make unpopular speech illegal.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Jul 30, 12:16 AM · #
While I’m not exactly against Conor’s argument, it’s worth noting that the ability to keep an untenable status quo is very harmful. We may have existed as a country for 200+ years, but that history involves killing a lot of americans to hold the union together and forcing the signing of 3 amendments at the point of a gun (musket?). So while healthcare and global warming might not rise to the visible external threat to the union that civil war is, these aren’t the only examples of the stress the political system puts on America.
— Dero · Jul 30, 12:19 AM · #
I suspect there is some ground for moderation here. Yglesias and Klein seem rightly concerned that there are arcane elements of the legislative process (such as the filibuster) which lead to inefficiencies in how Congress works. It would strike me as a bi-partisan ideal for our system to be both more efficient while still being restrained so that grand sweeping change is not the norm.
— Noah Kristula-Green · Jul 30, 03:34 AM · #
“The Founders designed the United States government to safeguard basic freedoms and disperse power as a hedge against tyranny. The ensuing 200+ years is a compelling argument that their priorities were wisely chosen.”
Yikes. The Founders were wide-eyed radicals of their time, solving the problems they saw in front of them, in the face of arguments that what they were doing was radical and destabilizing (rooted in Hobbes). The Americans fought a revolutionary war and put in place a crazy experiment based on pure theory of Locke and Paine and co. Then they spent the first 30 years making it up as they went along – reacting to monetary crisis, separation of powers crises, war, and later civil war.
It’s hilarious that conservatives try to claim the founding generation as their ideal — they graft a Friedman/Hayek-style conservative/libertarian bent on which is totally ahistorical. If you imagined an analogous set of thinkers and politicians today, especially given their views on religion and patriotism, Conor and friends would be leading the charge against them.
— Steve C · Jul 30, 04:31 AM · #
First, Conor neglects that another stated purpose of the Constitution is “to promote the general welfare.” Second, he seems to mischaracterize the context of Ezra’s reference to forseeable threats and the like. Surely the point is that the existence of such threats does not, per se, give rise to a liberal litmus test for a good system of governance, but rather provides a reason, other things being equal, to enact legislation to address them in a paricular case. The litmus test, or part of it, would simply be the more general idea that significant change should generally be available through the normal democratic process. One can almost always say that a significantly harmful status quo of long standing has worked “pretty well,” or better than any alternative would. But this is a remarkably extreme position in its own way, not least because the longer it is used, the more the harms associated with the status quo (e.g., disease) accumulate (and because it’s an article of faith that doesn’t allow in evidence that might cast doubt on its wisdom; continuity becomes an end in itself. Change can be for the worse, and for the better; in either case it allows us to learn from experience.
Finally, I do think civil liberties shouldn’t be easy to change because they have inherent moral as well as practical value. Most other political structures, and certainly economic arrangements, are more contestable and complex in their functions and effects, and so should be more subject to popular input.
— jason · Jul 30, 07:29 AM · #
What if climate change is an existential threat?
— Dong Si Ming · Jul 30, 12:22 PM · #
In general I agree wholeheartedly with Conor but I think there is a real issue not with government being unable to respond to long-term challenges (where I think that all your seeing is that people, rightly or wrongly, don’t in fact care that much about such challenges, and so the political system nicely doesn’t do what doesn’t matter to people and so works just fine) but rather with government not being able to do what people want right now. A pretty good example is redistricting reform, which I think is universally thought of as a good idea but fails spectacularly when attempted: watching Schwarzenegger’s trajectory on this issue was really something. And, that’s not really a “radical change” — I mean, cutting a geographic area up in more-or-less boxes, versus strange lizards, is radical?
In the health care case I generally think Mickey Kaus has gotten it right from the start as did, in his way, Bill Clinton: this “cost curve” stuff is a side issue and people don’t really really want it. (Every time I hear someone moaning that we’re about to spend 30% of our money on health care I think, oh, horror, as opposed to iPhones, Wiis, and F-22s.) And hear I think Ezra Klein of all people has no bitch: he cheered the reformers good and loud along the primrose path to the Orszag argment, which is where this long-term inflation stuff lives. Now on the other hand people do want personal health security, and to be spared worries about, can I personally lose my coverage? and you might have a bitch that Congress seems unable to pass a proposal to address that great desire of the people at large — only, well, my answer would be that it’s only now that that particular issue is being talked much about, instead it’s been this health-care inflation issue that really nobody, rightly or wrongly, is that agitated over.
Incidentally I think the moral “how can we have millions uninsured” issue is a lose, not just because people may just be uncaring schlubs, but also because people will drill down, say, look, there’s maybe 10 million long term uninsured who are prevented from getting care due to poverty, and then say, sheesh, I have to remake the system and spend a trillion bucks to fix that? There’s gotta be an easier way! And if that were the only thing you wanted to solve they’d be right.
But so, with health care you have an issue where, the campaign (look! we can stop health care inflation!) isn’t aligned with the policy problem (hey! I’m scared of losing my medical coverage!) And I think there’s been a lot of ink spilled now on the Obama presidency and how its policy choices often seem to blatantly ignore its campaign ideas, and God knows Clinton was ideologically plastic as well (note to even-handers: I swear I tried to say something similar about W. here but I had a hell of a time coming up with what I thought was a solid W. campaign “idea” to get trampled; his campaign was sort of content-free. Teacher testing, maybe?) I think in general a more interesting problem with the system — and it’s not just the Senate — is, the things people very much want from our leaders as they campaign actually differ a lot from the things we want as they govern which is bizarre. So while I agree that the government is suppose to be slow to react and suspicious of strong change, I still think there’s a disconnect between politicians’ incentives and what the people “want,” and that is something that the founding generation tried like hell to avoid, with internal arguments about what exactly lawmakers’ incentives should be.
I also think that while that friction biases the system towards “conservatism” it’s not quite fair to say it creates an asymmetric pressure on social progressives: it’s not that sense of “conservatism.” After all, remember all the anti-gay-marriage Amendment brouhaha, where people (correctly) pointed out that the whole issue was BS anyway because you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of actually ratifying such an Amendment.
— Sanjay · Jul 30, 01:35 PM · #
Don’t read Ezra that much but what MYeglesias says about the difficulty of moving legislation thru Congress—and the Senate in particular—is reasonable if you grant that this is essentially a parlor-game and not a serious proposal to amend the Constitution (or even the Holy “RULES OF THE SENATE”). What he says is that the present ‘Rules’ apply ‘veto points’ at certain intervals. A few ‘veto points’ might be good. They would force negotiations and tend to centralize a bill on its way to becoming a law. Too many ‘veto points’ are frequently bad. They give lots of people with strong interests in the outcome a chance to hold a bill for ransom. Makes sense to me.
Two examples: The present Constitution of the State of California severely restricts the ability of the State Gov’t to decrease spending—because substantial parts of the budget have been mandated by ballot initiatives. But the Constitution also makes it almost impossible to increase tax revenues because of similar initiatives and the requirement for a 2/3d majority in the legislature for any tax increase. Now either of these might look good to you. But together they make the chance much greater than it has to be that the State will default on it’s bonds and loans. Which would be very bad for the people of California. Too many ‘veto points’.
Second, reflect that the democracy of Great Britain was able to end slavery in the 1820s. But the ‘veto points’ in the US Constitution made it impossible to do so here. We revere the heroes of the Civil War and are proud of our achievements in saving the Union and ending slavery but no one can doubt that a horrible internecine slaughter (over 1 million killed!!) represents a failure of our Constitution.
— JohnMcC · Jul 30, 06:40 PM · #
And if that were the only thing you wanted to solve they’d be right.
No one who has genuinely confronted the depth of that suffering could ever say that.
— Freddie · Jul 30, 10:01 PM · #
Yglesias critiques one particular institution, the Senate, and one of its procedural (not constitutional) rules in particular. The argument that the Constitution generally has worked out well for 200 years (except for that whole Civil War and 27 amendments) is insufficient to rebut that critique, in my view.
— Josh E. · Jul 30, 11:43 PM · #
Freddie, that’s dumb. I’ve spent a lot of time uninsured because of a particular dumb stand on principle I took. My wife got hurt real, real bad — look up “basilar skull fracture,” and that wasn’t the worst of it — when she was insured but the hospital didn’t like her insurance and it was an issue that almost got her killed. My kid was on Medicaid, and thank God for it. And I’ve spent a lot of time working with people in need (and still do).
ANd what I said, is right. It just is. If that were the only problem you wanted to solve you could do it cheaper and easier. But, hey, maybe I just don’t feel for the poor like some blowhard. I haven’t confronted the depth of suffering.
— Sanjay · Jul 31, 12:56 AM · #
What’s outrageous, Freddie, is, you actually know something about what I do for a living. Four days out of five, “going to work” means I go to a hospital. The patients I work for are dirt poor and the most fucked-up out there: I see terrible brain injuries routinely (and my wife, who suffered a much worse one, works with those people as a volunteer). I see dads who can’t make new memories and are confused by their kids growing up. I walk through burn wards and hear conversations like: “How much? “70%” “Oh, that’s not so bad.” I see more health care misery in a week than you can imagine, boy.
No one who has genuinely confronted the depth of that suffering… Shit. If you didn’t know I worked in places like that, that would be just pompous blowhardism. But you do, so it’s malicious idiocy.
— Sanjay · Jul 31, 03:18 AM · #
Righteous, Sanjay.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 31, 03:46 AM · #
Not as righteous as “no one who has genuinely confronted the depth of that suffering” from some pup with an iPod, Schwenkler.
— Sanjay · Jul 31, 12:21 PM · #
Comparing GWB’s failed attempt to dismantle Social Security to Obama’s likely-successful efforts to reform a failing healthcare system is dishonest. Recall the Reagan era reforms of Social Security; those reforms passed the Congress because they were not an attempt to dismantle a highly successful program which was created by FDR to address a serious problem not unlike the failing healthcare system and global warming of/in 2009.
— rpg · Aug 1, 04:01 AM · #
The problem is that all sorts of things are “popular” when they’re defined in broad terms. Health Care Reform? Sure…everyone agrees it’s important…because everyone has a different definition of what constitutes “reform”.
But once you start legislating and actually define “reform”…that’s when the whole thing falls apart. Seems like the logical approach would be to define those aspects of health care that people are most concerned about, and to design the legislation around them. But…politics intrude and what we wind up with is legislation tilted toward the Party in power (or more specifically the chairmen of the committees who reflect the ideological tilt of the Party in power).
The current legislation is a disaster. It does nothing to address the escalating cost issues and is just another massive bureaucratic govt program with no cap on spending.
— JohnR · Aug 1, 12:34 PM · #
Nobody should kid themselves into believing that filibusters don’t stop conservative as well as progressive initiatives.
Social Security probably WOULD be privatized but for Social Security. At the beginning of 2005, Bush almost certainly had more than 50 votes for his plan in the Senate. Democrats were able to stop it only because they could amass 41 votes against it, which was difficult enough to accomplish.
Ezra Klein’s response is that allowing 42 (sic) Democrats to block privatization would have been a bad thing if the policy was popular. Easy to say. But is he serious? Would it be a good thing if Social Security benefits had been subject to the stock market crash? Really? How many millions of people would have to sink into poverty before Ezra reconsiders?
I say all this not to defend the filibuster, necessarily. But know that it really does cut both ways.
— Bruce · Aug 1, 05:35 PM · #
I don’t own an iPod. Between John Schwenkler, Sanjay and I, one of us has been in poverty. And it’s neither of them.
— Freddie · Aug 2, 08:05 PM · #
No, but Bush wasn’t proposing doing that in the short term. If his reforms had passed, some money would now be in private accounts, which would have lost money, but the amount of money would be small. Nobody would be sinking into poverty today because Social Security reform passed.
The real protection for Social Security is not the filibuster, which wasn’t used to block Bush’s Social Security proposals. The real protection is that the programs makes payments to lots of seniors, who tend to vote, so there is no way that Congress would even consider a proposal to just eliminate the program tomorrow. This has led Republicans to conclude that dismantling Social Security is a multi-generational project, which in turn gives Democrats a lot of time to block or reverse Republican proposals on Social Security.
I opposed Bush’s Social Security proposals, but if forced to choose between Social Security and health care, I would choose health care. So pondering a hypothetical scenario in which the filibuster is used to block both Bush’s Social Security proposals and Obama’s health care proposals doesn’t make me look favorably on the filibuster.
In short, if you are going to make a case for the filibuster, the Social Security battle is a bad place to start.
— Kenneth Almquist · Aug 2, 08:35 PM · #