“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
-Joe Biden, 2019
Among numerous other bits in the news recently, people are still debating the potential impact of the “election reforms” passed by the Republican government in Georgia. Defenders are telling cynics to “read what it actually says.” The text is here. https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 It starts off in a fairly defensive manner, Section 2 pointing out that “Many Georgia election processes were challenged in court, including the subjective signature-matching requirements, by Georgians on all sides of the political spectrum”, eliding the point that none of these court challenges produced fruit because the election processes were found valid, and concluding therefore that “changes made in this legislation in 2021 are designed to address the lack of elector confidence in the election system on all sides of the political spectrum”, which is a subjective interpretation at best, given that the lack of successful challenges meant that the only people creating a lack of confidence in the system were Donald Trump and the political party that gives his fingers a reach they would otherwise lack. Many conservative media have pushed their own defenses of the law, and some of them make a little sense. Like, the fact that the runoff period after the general election is now only four weeks. I don’t see why the race had to go into January. A runoff by definition means there are only two candidates left and everyone already knows who they are.
But if you’re criminalizing getting people food and water who are standing in line to vote, and are standing in long lines for extended periods BECAUSE the government has also reduced the number of polling places and hours, then clearly this is the political class picking its voters instead of the other way around, because they saw how a get-out-the-vote campaign shifted the results in Georgia, and they don’t want that happening again.
I am reminded of the old Libertarian joke that government is the guy who breaks your leg and then hands you a crutch and says ‘if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’ Well, in this case Republicans are more laissez-faire than the Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a good-faith position. Cause we know that in Florida, Catholic Cuban and Venezuelan communities came out in a big way to vote for Trump and other Republicans last November. If black communities were the stable base for Republicans that Florida Cubans are, they wouldn’t be pulling this shit. Nevertheless, they are pulling this shit, because black vote turnout was critical in winning Georgia for Democrats. So saying they’re only targeting racial communities for political reasons rather than actual racism is either a chicken-or-the-egg question or a distinction without a difference.
I actually kind of think that for all their flapping of fans, Republicans lean into how much liberals hate the idea of not giving water to voters in (post-summer) Georgia, because that’s what conservatives do these days, embrace their heel status as a sort of punk rock credential. It’s also distracted the press from the real problem with S.B. 202: Section 5 amends existing Code 21-2-30 to create a State Election Board which does not include the Secretary of State (who previously had authority over elections and who was personally leaned on by Trump to conjure votes he did not have) and in Section 6, the bill directs that “After following the procedures set forth in Code Section 21-2-33.2, the State Election Board may suspend county or municipal superintendents and appoint an individual to serve as the temporary superintendent in an election.”
Again, there were existing rules that highly benefited Republicans (for one thing, in the 2018 Governor’s race, Stacey Abrams was defeated by Republican Brian Kemp, who was still serving as the Secretary of State overseeing his own election). These were modified only as necessary last year because there was a global pandemic. Democrats played by Republican rules and still won, and Republican officials and judges determined that the results were indeed valid. So now they’re trying to change the rules so that such a result can never happen again.
Basically these guys had the same goal as Donald Trump, this is just the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Stupid.
Make no mistake: This is how the government works in Russia. This is how the government works in Venezuela. This is how governments worked under the Warsaw Pact: You could say you had a “Democratic Republic” and maybe even have more than one opposition party, but somehow they would never have enough votes to win, or even come close. That’s the goal.
And that is why Democrats and the other NotRepublicans of America are looking to see what Washington is going to do about all this. That and other things. After another round or two of shootings, pardon me if I gloss over the details, President Joe Biden announced on April 8 that he is “trying to limit ‘ghost guns’ and make it easier for people to flag family members who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase firearms with a series of executive actions taken Thursday in the wake of recent mass shootings.” In response, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott declared that Texas was going to be a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.” Then a few hours later Abbott had to express that he was praying for victims of a shooting in Bryan, Texas.
I actually have to agree with Senator John Kennedy (BR.- Louisiana) when he said, “We don’t need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” The problem is that in both cases, it’s his party that’s getting in the way of that, because if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.
New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait quotes Andrew McCarthy in National Review, saying “The conservative movement has argued for decades that the problem with voting is that too many people do it because it’s too convenient. ‘Voting is a privilege,’ National Review’s Andrew McCarthy argues. (A privilege, not a right.) ‘It would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people, hypnotized by the flimflam that a great nation needs to be fundamentally transformed rather than competently governed.” And I’d agree with that too. And to elaborate on my last paragraph, the problem isn’t the superficial truth of the Republican statement, it’s the deeper truth that they are the problem they claim to be against, since the whole premise of modern Republican politics is preying on civic illiteracy, selling emotionalism and flimflam, teaching people that what we need is not competent government but a transformation away from the Founders’ Republic. The irony being that while the Founders intended counter-majoritarian systems to act as a check on the civic illiterates, this agenda is never going to appeal to a majority and can only work if a gullible plurality is allowed to rule over them.
So since one faction of this “two party system” is so malign that it’s worse than useless, that means everyone is obliged to see what the Democrats are going to do whether we like them or not. And that means Democrats have to consider not only their near-infinite desires but their very limited room to move.
Whereas the Republican platform as of the 2020 convention is literally “we continue to support Donald Trump’s America First agenda” (and we can see exactly how they’re planning to do that), the Democratic platform is basically giving the Federal government that much more control over our affairs, given that certain states are creating supporting evidence that they shouldn’t be running without supervision from Washington. But this unitary agenda, not even considering the social angle, implies a lot more legislation, and a LOT more spending, which really means a lot more taxes, though they’re hoping you won’t notice that part.
I am still basically a Reason Magazine, Niskanen Center, center-right type of guy. I still think that John Maynard Keynes was the worst thing to happen in Western economics last century, although not because his theories were invalid. In fact, the older I get, the more I see how right they were. It’s just that they set the wrong example. The main dynamic of Keynesianism is what he called “countercyclical spending”, or what I might call counterintuitive spending, where the government spends money when there is no money (like in a recession or depression) to “prime the pump” and then cuts back on spending when the private economy is flush. This seems counterintuitive because the government is spending money when there isn’t any revenue from the private sector, but that’s the point: In tough times (like now) there isn’t any other source of money, so it has to be created. The problem is that you take on debt. Which leads to the real problem with Keynesianism, which is that both parties dismiss the other side of the countercycle, cutting spending (and even raising taxes) during a boom period. For obvious reasons, Republicans are loath to raise taxes and even Democrats have become leery of doing so, but neither party is that concerned with cutting spending, which is why the overall size of government increases under Democrats and why the debt increases are even greater under “fiscally conservative” Republicans and especially under the Trump Organization.
Again, this is one of those times when you need to have government spend money that the private sector can’t, so I’m not doctrinaire libertarian on this, but just as the Laffer Curve is a curve and not an a priori axiom that “lower taxes equal more government revenue”, taking on more debt does not automatically lead to greater prosperity. Just ask Italy or Greece. Creditors accept a large debt load only if the party in question has so many assets that it’s more feasible to let them hold the debt than to make them default. In the case of the US government, our assets are such that “the full faith and credit” of the country allows us to take on a debt that would be unimaginable to anyone else. But that assumes we’ll be good for it, and further financial mismanagement and incompetence may change that assumption.
Keynesianism only works because of the ancient principle, “If you owe the bank 100 dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much Donald Trump’s whole approach to finance.
Which is why Democrats aren’t going to care about the consequences of taxing and spending, cause they’ve got this thing called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, or as I call it, Magical Monetary Theory, cause it holds that since government creates money, government is the source of capital, and therefore any degree of desired spending can be justified as necessary and beneficial to the economy. And the laugh is that the best evidence for this “deficits don’t matter” attitude were the Administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, the free-marketest, most libertarianist president EVAR.
Like it matters, because there are limits to how much the President can do by executive order, and there are even more limits to how much the House can do without the Senate, because even if Democrats have a technical majority, in practice the chamber operates under a lazy version of the filibuster where the minority party doesn’t even have to hold the floor as long as they announce their attention to vote as a bloc to prevent a three-fifths majority vote. And this is why the liberal media was all aflutter at the announcement that Democrats are able to proceed with one more budget reconciliation bill this year (on the grounds that one was never passed for the 2020 fiscal year), because rather than hash things out with the other party like grownups (because the other party are not grownups), the Democrats who supposedly control the chamber have to wait for the word of the Senate Parliamentarian like she is the Oracle of Delphi.
There was an opinion recently from Jessica Levinson at MSNBC: “Democrats have the power to save democracy. Here’s why they won’t.“
Essentially, the only way Democrats can actually use their majority is to get rid of the filibuster, at least provisionally, but the main reason they don’t is that just as Republicans need it to keep such power as they still have while a minority, some Democrats want to keep the filibuster for the same reason, remembering how Harry Reid changed the cloture rules so that a filibuster is not required for judicial nominees, and then seeing how Mitch McConnell used that new standard to help Donald Trump flood the courts with new conservative appointees.
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these unnamed Democrats that the only reason they even have a technical majority is because Raphael Warnock was elected Senator from Georgia, the 2020 runoff election was to fill the last two years of a seat where the previous (Republican) Senator had to retire, Warnock has to run again for a regular six-year term in 2022, and thanks to S.B. 202, it just got a lot harder for Democrats to keep that majority. And then guess what Mitch McConnell is going to do to the Democrats’ filibuster once he’s back in charge?
The Democrats did come up with HR1 (or S.1), the “For the People Act”, which is supposed to address a lot of the issues that Republican states want to create with voting, but that’s another one of the things that ain’t going to pass unless they ditch the filibuster. (Not like anyone who isn’t a Democrat will find it much help in opening up our politics.)
And if anyone ever does try to name those Democrats who are so dead set against actually acting like a majority, the name they usually get to is Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia. Manchin is notable in even being an elected Democrat in West Virginia, back from the days when that was the norm and not a blue moon event. He’s big on traditions, like back when he and other Senators could commisserate regardless of party. But however culturally conservative he might be, he’s also an old-time Democrat who believes in big spending, which is hard to see how his priorities as a representative and a Democrat align with his priorities as a Senator.
New York Magazine had this bit about how Manchin is actually keen on promoting an infrastructure bill that could actually be twice as costly as the $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan just passed. Such an expensive bill would seem to be at odds with his desire to maintain the (alleged) tradition of bipartisanship through the filibuster, since anything that expensive likely won’t get passed by Republicans.
When Senator Manchin wrote a Washington Post op-ed staking his position, including the idea that we shouldn’t even be using reconciliation to pass legislation, leftist blog Lawyers, Guns & Money rendered its interpretation: “The most natural reading of the op-ed is that Joe Manchin is an abject moron who has never paid attention to anything that’s happened in the Senate during his entire tenure there, but I don’t believe this is accurate. Essentially, there are two major possibilities:
- Manchin is setting up a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger defense when Republicans refuse to compromise on anything and Dems agree to some kind of filibuster reform Manchin can sell as technically maintaining his pledge.
- Manchin is perfectly fine with total gridlock, and is happy not to accomplish much of anything as long as people have to continually kiss his ass to even get judges and cabinet officials approved.
“Alas, while I used to have optimism about door #1 at this point it seems like the latter is much more likely.”
Problem is, if Manchin either seriously expects good faith from the Party of Trump or is trying to create a position to change his mind when they do not act in good faith, then refusing to endorse filibuster reform even as a negotiating tactic removes the only tool Democrats have to pressure Republicans with. As for gridlock, a Senate with no filibuster and a majority by tiebreaker makes Manchin The Man Whose Ass Must Be Kissed to an even greater degree, for the reason Senator Coons stated. Thus one returns to the rejected theory: That Joe Manchin is an abject moron who, if he ever paid attention to what the Senate was like in his entire tenure, is certainly not aware of what it’s like now.
Which means in the short run at least, the direction that “conservatives” claim to hate so much keeps reinforcing, as we turn more and more powers over to an imperial executive because Congress can’t get anything done. And that direction keeps getting more and more “radical left” because the former Republican Party refuses to act as a moderating influence because it has no more moderate influences within itself, and Democrats now know there is no point in dealing with them.
I used to think of our politics as a situation where the Democrats were Soviet Russia, the Republicans were Nazi Germany and America was Poland. It’s even more sad and absurd than that: It’s more like a fight between two squads of Star Wars Stormtroopers where neither team can hit a target, yet one of them falls down anyway.