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Nobody’s a Moderate in the Republican Civil War

November 11, 2013 – 8:21 am

The Tea Party and establishment Republicans differ on style and tactics, not goals.

After his loss in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election, Tea Party Republican Ken Cuccinelli refused to make the traditional phone call to congratulate the winner, Terry McAuliffe.

No big deal, you might say. Cuccinelli has admitted in public that he didn’t win, and McAuliffe becomes governor in any case. The Outside the Beltway blog argues that the congratulating call doesn’t matter, because such gracious gestures are insincere anyway. And Kevin Drum threw the question out to his readers: Does symbolic politeness still matter or not? (Typically, the comment thread quickly devolved into insults that leave no clear consensus answer. And that’s a meta-answer, I suppose.)

But whether the absent phone call has any direct significance on governance, I think it is important. Congratulating the winner, no matter how much your defeat still rankles, recognizes that in the end we are all on the same side. We are all Americans, or (in this case) all Virginians. However bitter the campaign has been, however overheated the rhetoric has become, we all want the collective project we call “government” to succeed, whether our side gets to lead that government  or not.

That is more-or-less precisely what the Tea Party denies: We are not all on the same side. In President Obama’s case, Tea Partiers often don’t even admit that he’s an American. And they see election campaigns not as contests between differing views of how to move our country forward, but as apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil.

The Obama/Romney election, evangelist Franklin (Billy’s son) Graham warned last fall, “could be America’s last call to repentance and faith. … There’s still time to turn from our wicked ways so that He might spare us from His wrath against sin.” And the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer saw the shutdown/debt-ceiling showdown as evidence “the destruction of America” is on President Obama’s “bucket list”.

Like Cuccinelli, Ted Cruz did not even fake politeness when the President visited Cruz’ home state of Texas this week: “President Obama should take his broken promises tour elsewhere.” Where’s that famous Southern hospitality?

Tea Party strategist

Legitimate rivals merit politeness, but if the AntiChrist wins you don’t congratulate him on his victory or give him a chance to implement the vision the voters have endorsed. You continue the struggle wherever and however you can. And if you bring the temple down on your own head like Samson, you take satisfaction in the number of enemies who perish with you.

The Republican establishment. One popular interpretation of Tuesday’s election results was that establishment Republicans had flexed their muscles and proved that they (and not the Tea Party) are the GOP’s best hope for victory.

Christie and AntiChrist

There was some truth to that. Cuccinelli’s campaign suffered from a lack of money, in large part because big bankroll donors like the Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t contribute. The Chamber also figured in the victory of establishment Republican Bradley Byrne over Tea Party Republican (and birther) Dean Young in Alabama’s 1st congressional district.

And the biggest Republican winner of the night was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had praised Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy and accompanied Obama on a photo-op tour of damaged areas late in the 2012 campaign: “It’s been very good working with the President,” Christie said. “He and his Administration have been coordinating with us. It’s been wonderful.”

Frontrunner? After his landslide win in a blue state, some pundits anointed Christie the early frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, while others were more skeptical.

But his potential opponents have treated Christie’s victory like a serious threat, barely even pretending to be happy about a Republican victory. Rand Paul gave Christie a backhanded compliment, saying that the Republican Party needs “moderates like Chris Christie who can win in New Jersey.” (Recall that “moderate” is an insult in GOP circles. It was Mitt Romney’s opponents who called him a “Massachusetts moderate“, which the Boston Globe characterized as “the two dirtiest words in the Republican lexicon”. Romney himself claimed to be “severely conservative“.) Rick Perry likewise questioned whether “a conservative in New Jersey a conservative in the rest of the country”.

Ted Cruz’ comments were even more pointed:

I think it is terrific that he is brash, that he is outspoken, and that he won his race. But I think we need more leaders in Washington with the courage to stand for principle.

So congratulations to the cowardly, unprincipled Governor Christie.

Moderate? For most of American history, moderate sounded reasonable and good, and to much of the electorate it still does. But what evidence is there of Christie’s moderation?

Traditionally, a moderate was someone who shared at least a few positions with the opposing party (like Democrat Joe Lieberman’s support for the Iraq War and waterboarding, or Republican Rudy Giuliani’s support for abortion rights and immigration reform), or shared goals with the other party but tried to achieve them by different means. (That’s what RomneyCare was about, and why Mitt Romney would have deserved the moderate label if he had truly run on his record. Mitt tried to achieve universal health care via private insurance and the free market. Obama’s embrace of that moderate-Republican approach should have earned him moderate status as well.)

I can’t think of any issue where Christie fits the bill. His position on marriage equality seems typical: He believes only in opposite-sex marriage. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage in New Jersey, and then sued to prevent same-sex marriages after a state judge ruled in their favor. He eventually dropped the suit and allowed same-sex marriages to proceed in New Jersey, but only after it became clear he would lose.

That’s not moderation, it’s pragmatism. He doesn’t waste his effort on losing battles.

He occasionally makes agreeable noises about gun control, but in the only real test he vetoed three popular bills, one being a version of something he had proposed himself just a few months before.

On contraception and abortion, he vetoed funding for Planned Parenthood five times. The anti-abortion Life News says he proved wrong the “media elite [who] claim Republicans can’t win on a pro-life platform.”

He believes in tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for the poor. There’s nothing in his record resembling RomneyCare.

ThinkProgress goes into more detail on Christie’s conservative record.

Opposing the Tea Party doesn’t make you a moderate. Likewise, you’ll search Bradley Byrne’s web site in vain for any moderate policy. He just won’t say stuff as gratuitously offensive as his Tea Party opponent Dean Young, who wants anybody who supports marriage equality thrown out of the Republican Party

If you want to have homosexuals pretending like they’re married, they need to go to the Democrat Party.

Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, as well as Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell are all likely to face Tea Party opposition as they run for re-election. They all (eventually) voted to keep the government open and not default on America’s commitments, but they’re no moderates. Just because they won’t set themselves (or the country) on fire to protest ObamaCare doesn’t mean that they secretly support it.

So when they run against Tea Party extremists in the Republican primaries, I’ll be rooting for them. But that offer expires the morning after the primary. I respect their higher level of politeness and their caution about burning down the house we all live in. But they differ from the Cuccinellis and Cruzes and Youngs merely in tactics, not in goals.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (3)

The Filibuster and the War on Women

November 4, 2013 – 11:48 am

The abuse of the filibuster is a hard issue to get people excited about. It’s one of those technical political things that takes too long to explain and is hard to connect to problems voters care about.

This week, making those connections was a little easier. If you care about a woman’s right to decide whether she gets pregnant or has a baby, the connection to the filibuster was all too clear. Here are three of this week’s big stories:

  • Senator John Cornyn threatened to filibuster anyone President Obama nominates to the D. C. federal appeals court. He’s not making objections to the specific judges Obama has picked, he’s arguing that Obama shouldn’t be allowed to make any picks at all. The court’s current 4-4 conservative/liberal balance should be locked in, no matter how many elections Democrats win.
  • That same court issued a temporary injunction to suspend ObamaCare’s contraception mandate for certain firms, in anticipation of a permanent ruling that employers’ religious freedom gives them power over employees’ health decisions. The judge who wrote the majority opinion is a radical conservative that Democrats tried to block when President Bush nominated her, but they had to back down when Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” to eliminate the filibuster permanently.
  • Another judge from that same batch of Bush appointees lifted a lower-court injunction against a Texas anti-abortion law that (among other restrictions) instantly closes about 1/3 of Texas abortion clinics, leaving large areas of the state without abortion services, again in anticipation of the law’s ultimate approval.

Let’s take those one at a time.

Filibuster abuse and the D. C. court. Wikipedia describes the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia circuit like this:

While it has the smallest geographic jurisdiction of any of the United States courts of appeals, the D.C. Circuit, with eleven active judgeships, is arguably the most important inferior appellate court. The court is given the responsibility of directly reviewing the decisions and rulemaking of many federal independent agencies of the United States government based in the national capital, often without prior hearing by a district court. Aside from the agencies whose statutes explicitly direct review by the D.C. Circuit, the court typically hears cases from other agencies under the more general jurisdiction granted to the Courts of Appeals under the Administrative Procedure Act. Given the broad areas over which federal agencies have power, this often gives the judges of the D.C. Circuit a central role in affecting national U.S. policy and law.

A judgeship on the D.C. Circuit is often thought of as a stepping-stone for appointment to the Supreme Court.

The court has 11 active judgeSHIPs, but only 8 active judges. (It had only 7 — and a 4-3 conservative majority — until Obama finally got his first pick approved in May. It also has six semi-retired senior judges. If you count them, the court has a 9-5 conservative majority.) That’s because there are three vacancies. The Constitution (Article II, Section 2) specifies how those vacancies should be filled:

The President … shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for

The filibuster is a historical accident. The Founders didn’t envision it, and although an 1806 rule change made filibusters possible, the first one didn’t happen until 1837. They were rare until the 1970s, and truly skyrocketed when the Republicans became the Senate minority after the 2006 election.

Filibusters of presidential nominations were rare until the Clinton administration, and then Democrats retaliated during the Bush years. But even then, the justification for a filibuster was always some alleged problem with the individual nominee. (Bush nominee Janice Rogers Brown, for example, was filibustered for a history of inflammatory decisions, having once written of Social Security: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have the right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”)

What’s new in the Obama years is the use of the filibuster to nullify a federal office by refusing to approve anyone to head it, regardless of character or qualifications. Until Senate Democrats threatened to invoke the so-called nuclear option in July, Republicans were on track to invalidate the entire National Labor Relations Board, essentially nullifying all laws protecting workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain collectively in good faith.

Cornyn proposes an extension of this unprecedented tactic: using the filibuster to nullify the three vacancies on the D. C. court, ostensibly because the court’s case load doesn’t require 11 judges. (He wasn’t bothered by an even lower case load when Bush appointed Rogers.)

If over-staffing of the D.C. court is indeed a problem (and not just a pretext to stave off a liberal majority), the Constitution provides a way to solve it in Article I, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power … To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court

In other words, Congress could pass a law shrinking the D. C. court, if that were really a problem. But legislation requires a majority vote in both houses and the signature of the President, which Cornyn can’t get because his party can’t win national elections.

This is what the filibuster has become: not just a way to block new laws or objectionable appointments, but a way for a minority to repeal legislation already passed or to achieve its goals without passing laws at all.

Who needs to win elections?

The contraception mandate. Thursday, the previously mentioned Janice Rogers Brown (of Social-Security-is-cannibalism fame) was the deciding vote in a 2-1 decision by the D. C. appeals court to grant an injunction blocking enforcement of ObamaCare’s contraception mandate on a business owned by two Catholic brothers. The ruling isn’t a final decision in the case, but it reads like one, because one key consideration in granting such an injunction is a belief that the injunction-seeking side is likely to prevail.

Fortunately, Rogers stopped short of declaring that corporations are protected by the First Amendment’s free-exercise-of-religion clause, which would have produced true chaos. But the 400-employee company is owned by two brothers who claim to operate according to Catholic principles (i.e., having pro-life bumper stickers on their trucks), so the brothers’ religious freedom is violated by the requirement that they provide contraception coverage to their female employees.

I’ve stated my position on this issue at length before: I believe these claims of “religious freedom” are actually passive aggression, stretching claims of one’s own moral purity to ridiculous lengths in order to control the behavior of others. I was pleased to see many of my own favorite arguments show up in the dissenting opinion of  Senior Judge Harry Edwards (the only Democratic appointee among the senior judges) (I’m not claiming Edwards reads the Sift or that the arguments are original to me):

It has been well understood since the founding of our nation that legislative restrictions may trump religious exercise. Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U.S. 599, 603 (1961). Were it otherwise, “professed doctrines of religious belief [would be] superior to the law of the land, and in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

and illustrates the point with an example Sift readers will recognize:

A Christian Scientist, whose religion has historically opposed conventional medical treatment, might claim that his corporation is entitled to a religious exemption from covering all medical care except healers who treat medical ailments with prayer.

Edwards sees the conflict between the owners’ religious beliefs and the mandate, but does not find that it meets the legal standard of a “substantial burden”, using another analogy I’ve used here.

The Supreme Court has never applied the Free Exercise Clause to find a substantial burden on a plaintiff’s religious exercise where the plaintiff is not himself required to take or forgo action that violates his religious beliefs, but is merely required to take action that might enable other people to do things that are at odds with the plaintiff’s religious beliefs.

… The Gilardis do not contend that their religious exercise is violated when Freshway pays wages that employees might use to purchase contraception, and the Mandate does not require the Gilardis to facilitate the use of contraception any more directly than they already do by authorizing Freshway to pay wages.

Edwards quotes a 1982 Supreme Court decision:

Congress and the courts have been sensitive to the needs flowing from the Free Exercise Clause, but every person cannot be shielded from all the burdens incident to exercising every aspect of the right to practice religious beliefs. When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.

If not for the filibuster, that might be the majority opinion.

Texas abortion law. One of the other Bush judicial appointees who made it through the Senate under threat of the nuclear option was Priscilla Owen, whose appointment the Houston Chronicle opposed with these words:

The problem is not that Owen is “too conservative,” as some of her critics complain, but that she too often contorts rulings to conform to her particular conservative outlook. It’s saying something that Owen is a regular dissenter on a Texas Supreme Court made up mostly of other conservative Republicans.

No less a conservative than Alberto Gonzales once characterized Owen’s opinion in a Texas abortion case as “an unconscionable act of judicial activism”. In other words, even among conservative judges, she stood out as particularly radical.

The stipulation in the recent Texas abortion law (the one Wendy Davis delayed for a session with her famous state-legislature filibuster) that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges in local hospitals is one of a number of regulations designed to close clinics, and is largely devoid of any legitimate purpose. The lower-court judge found that the law was “without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” Similar laws in Wisconsin and other states have been blocked by federal judges.

But thanks to Judge Owen, this one is allowed to take effect. Abortion clinics are already closing, and it is estimated the 1/3 of all abortion clinics in Texas — already not that common — will be unable to meet the requirement.

End the filibuster. Right now, conservatives are benefitting from the fact that Senate Republicans have been more willing to play hardball than Democrats. Democrats under Bush attempted to block only the most outrageous nominees, and for the most part they failed. Those judges are on the bench now, fighting the war on women.

That’s just one front of the struggle, the one whose dots were most easily connected this week. Ultra-conservative judges have brought us Citizens United, came close to constructing an entirely novel interpretation of the Commerce Clause specifically to torpedo ObamaCare, and across-the-board have extended the rights of corporations and the rich over workers, consumers, and the general public.

President Bush did not try to be “reasonable” in his appointments or seek uncontroversial nominees. He nominated the most activist conservative judges he could find, and Senate Republicans refused to let the Democrats filibuster even the worst of them.

Now that the tables have turned, the filibuster has been expanded into a general tool of minority rule. It’s time to end it, once and for all.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

The Method of Madness

October 28, 2013 – 12:33 pm

It isn’t that Obama has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe.

In the shutdown/debt-ceiling fight, the Tea Party Republicans put President Obama in a position where compromise was a practical impossibility: They demanded concessions in exchange for a resolving a crisis that they created, and that they could recreate at will. To give them anything at all would invite an endless series of crises that drop-by-drop would bleed the administration dry. The election of 2012 would effectively have been nullified.

So Obama held firm and the non-Tea-Party Republicans blinked. The deal did not resolve the crisis, but it did buy time. The government is funded until January 15 and the debt ceiling is raised until February 7. Obama didn’t win anything in terms of policy; he just got the metaphorical hostages released for a few months.

Now, presumably, we should be negotiating about the budget and other government policies, so that January and February don’t hit us the way October did. But increasingly we face the question: Negotiate about what?

The essence of negotiation is to figure out what you where you would be willing to compromise with the other side and where they might be willing to compromise with you. It presumes a desire on both sides to reach an agreement.

But increasingly, liberals like me are becoming skeptical. For the Tea Party base, the point of this last fight seems to have been the fight itself. It accomplished nothing, and (by one estimate) cost the economy $24 billion, reducing the growth rate in 4th-quarter GDP from 3% to 2.4%. But that leads Ann Coulter to say, “We should be proud. Tea Partiers should be standing tall after the last few weeks.” And Ted Cruz went home to a victory tour, reportedly getting standing ovations of eight minutes and 14 minutes.

What’s up with that?

So often, when you try to grapple with the issues the fight is supposed to be about, they evaporate. The national debt is supposed to be an apocalyptic threat to America. But the fact that the annual deficit is dropping does not seem to mitigate the urgency. The prospect of going back to the tax rates that produced a surplus in the last years of the Clinton administration is off the table. No tax increase of any kind can be part of the solution, no matter what spending cuts it might be coupled with. Not even egregious tax loopholes can be closed, unless that money is used to lower taxes somewhere else.

So we have a problem that is destroying America, but you can’t consider paying any money to solve it?

Some on the Left have begun talking about “post-policy nihilism” — Republican opposition for the sake of opposition, even when Obama offers their own ideas back to them. Or passing a budget whose cuts they themselves won’t vote for when they’re spelled out.

What are we to make of bizarre irrationalities, like Ted Cruz shutting down the government, and then protesting that the national monuments are shut down? With a confederate flag in the audience and sharing the podium with a guy who called on President Obama to

leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.

Ryan Cooper comments:

these tea partiers were absolutely incandescent with rage at Obama that the national parks are shut down. This was the plan, don’t you remember? Guys? The only operating principle at work here seems to be “If X is bad, then X is Obama’s fault.”

The total disregard for even the simplest details or logic here, even according to the Republicans’ own frame of reference, underscores again that this crisis has nothing to do with actual policy differences. This is nothing but the politics of reactionary grievance.

Mike the Mad Biologist elaborated by referring to a piece he had previously written about Sarah Palin:

Her policy ignorance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Palin is conceptually and intellectually poor because her politics are not about policies, but a romantic restoration of the ‘real’ America to its rightful place. The primary purpose of politics is not to govern, not to provide services, and not to solve mundane, although often important, problems. For the Palinist, politics first and foremost exists to enable the social restoration of ‘real’ Americans (think about the phrase “red blooded American”) and the emotional and social advantages that restoration would provide to its followers (obviously, if you’re not a ‘real’ American, you might view this as a bad thing…). Practicalities of governance, such as compromise and worrying about reality-based outcomes, actually get in the way.

And that, I think, gets to the heart of it. The root motivation of the Tea Party isn’t the deficit or ObamaCare or any other policy it’s currently focused on. The root motivation is tribal: a feeling that People-Like-Me used to own America, but it is being taken away by People-Like-Them and needs to be taken back.

That’s why nothing Obama can do is right. It isn’t that he has the wrong policies or writes the wrong numbers into his budget proposals. It’s that he belongs to the wrong tribe. Who that tribe is, exactly, varies from person to person and situation to situation. Sometimes it’s racial and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s cultural — the whole guns-and-religion thing. Sometimes it’s the Makers vs. the Takers. But what unites them all is a sense of tribal grievance. People-Like-Me used to own American and need to take it back.

I am in debt to Jonathan Korman (a.k.a Miniver Cheevy) for making the connection between the Palinist rhetorical style and the “Duckspeak” of 1984. After rendering an apparent word salad into free verse, Korman finds the structureless structure:

You may have trouble following Palin not only because of the way her arguments jump around, but also because they are almost all incomplete. To decode them, you need to know that they are allusions to right-wing talking points. … I submit that this is not just clumsiness. This is a method, if not necessarily a conscious one.

The point is to remind the initiated of feelings and conclusions and frames without providing any actual facts or ideas that could be thought about or disputed. Orwell noted the usefulness of this technique in “The Principles of Newspeak“.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument.

…. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’.

This is a common speech pattern on the Right. You just quack “Benghazi” or “out-of-control spending” or “religious freedom” or “the Constitution” and whole narratives of misinformation click into place. And because they need not be spelled out, they cannot be challenged.

I’m not sure where we can go from here. A group with policy goals can be negotiated with. A aggrieved tribe with identity issues really can’t be.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (4)

A State-by-State Update on Voter Suppression

October 28, 2013 – 8:18 am

Since June’s Supreme Court ruling that threw out parts of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has lost its ability to block state laws designed to disenfranchise blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Subsequently, Republican-run states have been eagerly taking advantage of their vote-suppressing opportunities.

Here are the stories I ran across just this month:

North Carolina. The can’t-miss video clip of the week was The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi interviewing North Carolina Republican Executive Committee member Don Yelton. Yelton

  • admitted that the voter-fraud problem in his county was no more than 1 or 2 people out of 60,000
  • used the cliche “One of my best friends is black.”
  • admitted he shared the famous Obama-witch-doctor photo on Facebook
  • admitted that North Carolina’s voter-suppression law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt. … If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get off their bohunkus and get a photo ID, so be it. If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” When Mandvi summed up “and it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat”, Yelton sarcastically said “Gee” as if no one could have possibly foreseen that.
  • justified voter suppression by pointing to people “too stupid” to get a photo ID and asking: “Do you want those people picking your president?”

At one point Yelton’s responses caused Mandvi to say, “You know that we can hear you, right?” Apparently the local Republican Committee chair could hear him too, because he asked for and got Yelton’s resignation.

Virginia. Virginia has a statewide election a week from tomorrow, so of course it’s time for a last-minute purge of the voter rolls. (That’s how Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State — and George W. Bush campaign chair — Katherine Harris won the White House for Jeb’s brother in 2000.) MSNBC reports:

Lawrence Haake III, the registrar of Chesterfield County and a Republican, told MSNBC he received a list from state election officials in August of around 2,200 voters in his county to be struck from the rolls. The state said the names had shown up in a database of voters registered in more than one state.

But when Haake tested a sample of around 1000 names, he found that 174 of them had registered in Virginia more recently than any other state, meaning they were eligible to vote. In an affidavit filed as part of the Democratic challenge to the purge, Haake called the list “clearly inaccurate and unreliable.”

Since there is no evidence that any of the voters on the purge list have voted in multiple states at once (or intend to), the main (and possibly the only) effect on Virginia’s elections will be to disenfranchise voters who believe they are registered legally.

The court challenge to the purge was denied. (Since Haake and a few other local election officials had refused to purge any name they found to be inaccurate, there was no proof that any specific person had been unfairly disenfranchised, despite the fact that other officials appear to have implemented the purge without further investigation.) The purge was defended in court by the Virginia Attorney General’s office. Coincidentally, the AG is Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who is currently trailing in the polls.

The problem here is similar to the one in South Carolina that I discussed in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“: When you assemble lists like this by matching computer databases (in SC they matched voter rolls against death notices) you make mistakes. Taking a voter off the rolls needs to be treated as a serious matter, requiring human oversight. Those humans need time to do their jobs, and the purged voters need to be notified and given time to protest, rather than just being told they can’t vote when they show up at the polls.

Texas. Texas women are discovering an important reason everyone should care about protecting everyone else’s vote: You might be next. The new Texas voter-ID law mandates that the name on your voter registration and the ID you show match exactly, which can be a problem for many women. The new law tripped up Judge Sandra Watts, because her driver’s license lists her maiden name as her middle name (as was standard in 1964 when she got married); her voter registration lists her actual middle name.

KIII TV reports: “Nueces County election officials say it is often a problem for women who use maiden names or hyphenated names.” As for the voter fraud this law supposedly targets, KIII quotes District Attorney Mark Skurka: “I have never seen an issue of that in Nueces County, in all the years that I’ve been here.”

Because local election officials determined that the name on Judge Watts’ driver’s license was “substantially similar” [definition here] to her voter registration, she did get to vote after signing an additional affidavit. (Not only does this take extra time, but it gives a vote-suppressing local official an opportunity to cut corners on the definition of “substantially similar” or to say menacing things about the penalties for perjury in hopes that the voter will be intimidated and go away.) She could also have voted a provisional ballot, which would only be counted if she came back with “proper identification” within six days. If the problem is a name mismatch, proper ID might have to include a marriage or divorce certificate. (And if you can’t lay your hands on those documents and say “screw it, the election wasn’t decided by one vote anyway”, the vote suppressors win.)

Of course the primary targets of voter suppression are people who don’t drive: primarily the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. If you’re poor, live in a city, and take the bus to work, Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for you to vote.

It’s estimated that 1.4 million Texans who would otherwise be eligible to vote don’t have a driver’s license or other acceptable ID. Supposedly that’s OK, because they can obtain a free state ID card. According to the Dallas Morning News, 41 such cards have been issued.

Again, you need documentation verifying your current name. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, about 1/3 of women can’t meet that standard. Time quotes the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser: “A full 34% of women don’t have documents proving citizenship with their current name on it.”

And this is all supposed to solve the problem of voter impersonation, which the Dallas Morning News describes as “nearly non-existent“. In July I described the attempt of the conservative media to create a different impression in “The Myth of the Zombie Voter“.

Kansas and Arizona. Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for registering to vote was thrown out by the Supreme Court in June — it was so bad that the 7-2 majority opinion was written by arch-conservative Justice Scalia — because it violated the federal National Voter Registration Act. But Arizona (and Kansas, which passed a similar law) think they have a way around the Court’s ruling: two-tier voting. Federal elections may be subject to the NVRA, but maybe if a separate registration is required for state and local elections, the citizenship-proof requirement can be applied to them. And if the dual-registration process is time-consuming and confusing for new voters … well, that’s win/win, isn’t it?

If that tactic reminds you of Jim Crow, it should. The Nation’s Ari Berman quotes the ACLU’s Dale Ho:

These dual registration systems have a really ugly racial history. They were set up after Reconstruction alongside poll taxes, literacy tests and all the other devices that were used to disenfranchise African-American voters.

This time Hispanics are the primary target, but they’re also suppressing Arizona’s Native American vote. (The Intertribal Council was the lead plaintiff in the suit against the Arizona law. Native Americans have been specifically targeted in South Dakota and Montana.) (BTW, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly apparently did NOT say Native Americans were illegal immigrants. That rumor is another case of satire jumping the fence into the news pasture.)

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (1)

Don’t Means-Test Medicare

October 14, 2013 – 9:57 am

Sooner or later (I hope) Congress will get past self-created problems like the shutdown and the debt ceiling and start talking about something real: the long-term budget and how to pay for expensive-but-necessary programs like Social Security and Medicare. And when that day comes, one idea the Republicans will put forward is means-testing. (It’s already happening: Tuesday 51 Republican congressmen wrote to Speaker Boehner calling for “Means-testing benefits for high-income recipients of Social Security”.)

At first glance, it makes sense: The $15,000 a year that Social Security pays the average retiree may be a lifesaver to people who didn’t manage to save anything when they were working (or who did save but lost it all to fraud, accident, or a health problem), but Warren Buffett probably won’t even notice if his checks stop coming. And how much are janitors and check-out clerks putting into Medicare just so the government can pay for Warren’s cancer treatments?

Back in February, Yuval Levin put the case like this:

Democrats want to close the budget gap by having the government lean more heavily on the wealthy, while Republicans want to close it by having the government spend less money. Both sides should agree at least to spend less money on the wealthy — via means testing. It may surprise some Americans to learn that the United States spends quite a lot on the affluent, especially through the entitlement programs at the heart of the budget fight: Social Security and Medicare. Both programs move money from relatively poorer young people to relatively richer old people, and they are growing ever more expensive. Means-testing — allocating benefits according to need — might offer both sides a way out.

Levin is a conservative who used to work for the Bush administration, edits the right-leaning National Affairs, and occasionally writes for the conservative flagship, National Review. So what does he have against the rich? And why does a liberal like Paul Krugman defend those upper-class benefits?

Part of the issue is technical: When you do the math, means-testing doesn’t save any significant amount of money unless you’re cutting benefits for people considerably closer to the middle class than Warren Buffett. (Conservatives often make that case with regard to tax increases, but it’s much more true here. The top 1% make 19.3% of the national income, but I doubt they account for 19.3% of Medicare spending.)

But that can’t be the heart of it, because every little bit helps, right? Even if we’re not talking about much money, every dollar we don’t spend on wealthy people is one more we don’t have to borrow.

Here’s the heart of it: Means-testing is actually the opening shot in a much longer strategy to cut entitlement benefits for everyone. It relies on a broader principle you can see all around you: If you want to destroy a public program, first get the rich people out of it.

Think about cities with first-class public transportation like San Francisco or Washington. At rush hour on the BART or the Metro you’ll see a lot of three-piece suits, because no matter how much money you make, public transit is just a good way to get to work. But in cities with crappy systems — dirty buses that don’t come very often and don’t go where you want — public transit is mainly for the underclass. Maids and janitors take the bus to work, but bankers don’t.

Now obviously, rich people have options, so they won’t ride a crappy system. But the arrow of causality also points the other way: Systems that rich people don’t ride tend to get crappier and crappier. It’s not hard to understand why: When there’s a budget crunch, the people who decide what to cut are rich, or at least well-to-do politicians who have to answer to rich donors. If they think of public transit as something other (i.e. poorer) people use, it’s easy for them to imagine those people making do with less. But if they use it themselves, they’re going to fight to keep it operating at a high level.

Ditto for schools. In towns where everybody’s kids — rich and poor alike — go to the public high school, you can be sure the school will have a full range of options and amenities. When times are tough, the well-to-do decision-makers may not understand why poor kids need foreign languages or music or calculus. But it’s different if their own kids and grandkids are going to have to do without (and explain that deficiency when they apply to Harvard).

So if you want to kill public schools in your town, start a voucher program that draws the children of the well-to-do to private schools. That way, rich and professional-class parents — people who have the ear of decision-makers and could be articulate spokesmen for all parents — will stop taking public-school issues personally. Debates about public education will be about those people — and what can you really expect out of their kids anyway? Rhetoric about “throwing money down a rat hole” won’t offend anybody who really matters.

Imagine if we means-tested the public libraries or the parks. You could only get in if you could prove that you were too poor to afford your own books or a yard big enough for your kids to play in. I think before long we’d decide that the poor don’t need a lot of books, and if their parks are over-crowded and poorly maintained, well, what do they expect?

So yeah, let’s remove the rich people from Medicare. Let’s turn it into a welfare program, and make non-participation a status symbol. Then when we cut taxes again and create new deficits, budget-cutters can sharpen their pencils, secure in the knowledge that benefit cuts won’t hurt anybody who lives in their neighborhood. (I mean, seriously, do waitresses really need the latest chemo-therapy drugs? What do those people expect, anyway?)

On the other hand, we could let entitlements be entitlements — care you get not because you’re poor, but because you’re American. Then when future budget-cutters make their proposals, they’ll have to explain why Americans don’t deserve the best.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Seven Key Points About the Shutdown

October 7, 2013 – 1:10 pm

1. This is not a pox-on-both-your-houses situation. The Republicans planned this shutdown and carried it out.

Last Monday, on the eve of the shutdown, Rachel Maddow showed the tapes of one Republican candidate after another making campaign speeches about shutting down the government and being cheered for it. That never happens on the Democratic side. No Democratic candidate for Congress tells his crowds he’s going to shut down the government and expects to get a cheer. Rachel summarized:

What is happening tonight is happening tonight because this is what Republicans want to do. This is what they promised to do. … Elect Republicans and they will burn the place down and they will laugh while they do it and have a great time.

The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander talked to a number of Republican donors from the banking industry, who said Rep. Walden (chair of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which wants their money) told them “We have to do this because of the Tea Party.” (An NRCC spokesman denies Walden said that.)

Jonathan Chait traces the Republicans’ post-2012-defeat strategy to a meeting in January.

If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

The first element of the strategy is a kind of legislative strike. Initially, House Republicans decided to boycott all direct negotiations with President Obama, and then subsequently extended that boycott to negotiations with the Democratic Senate. (Senate Democrats have spent months pleading with House Republicans to negotiate with them, to no avail.) This kind of refusal to even enter negotiations is highly unusual. The way to make sense of it is that Republicans have planned since January to force Obama to accede to large chunks of the Republican agenda, without Republicans having to offer any policy concessions of their own.

2. This “budget” showdown has nothing to do with the budget. Both sides agree on the spending number that should be in the continuing resolution.

That’s because Democrats agreed to the Republicans’ number. In other words, the only genuine concession in this process has come from the Democrats. John Boehner could have taken that concession, passed a continuing resolution to avoid the shutdown, and then called a press conference to declare victory. Instead he shut down the government.

3. The threat not to raise the debt ceiling is unprecedented, except for when these same Republicans made the same threat in 2011.

Posturing about the debt ceiling is perennial: “Look how profligate the party in power is. They’ve run up so much debt we have to raise the ceiling.” But making a credible threat not to raise the debt ceiling unless your legislative demands are met? No. That is an absolutely new tactic in American politics.

Slate’s David Weigel goes through all the alleged examples of the Democrats threatening the debt ceiling. In 1981, Tip O’Neil tried to get President Reagan to promise that Republicans wouldn’t use a debt-ceiling vote against incumbent Democrats in the next election cycle (i.e., no policy demands), but passed it in plenty of time. In 1984, a Democratic committee chair blocked a debt ceiling bill for one day, seeking defense spending cuts. He was roundly criticized for “brinksmanship” and backed down.

That’s it. Dozens of other times Democratic majorities in Congress have passed debt-ceiling increases proposed by Republican presidents without making an issue of it.

If Democrats accepted the tactic Republicans are using, the September, 2007 debt-ceiling increase would have been an opportunity for Nancy Pelosi to demand deficit-reducing changes like a repeal of the Bush tax cuts or an end to Iraq War. But that didn’t happen, because Democrats don’t operate by extortion.

4. Republicans have redefined he words negotiate and compromise.

ThinkProgress’ Judd Legum summed up the Republican “negotiation”:

Can I burn down your house?
No
Just the 2nd floor?
No
Garage?
No
Let’s talk about what I can burn down.
No
YOU AREN’T COMPROMISING!

In a real compromise, both sides give something and both sides get something. So far, the Democrats have been offered nothing.

In the 2011 crisis, President Obama repeatedly tried to negotiate a “grand bargain” with Speaker Boehner that would knock trillions off the long-term deficit. That failed, and the “supercommitte” negotiations that were supposed to replace the sequester failed, on the same point: Republicans insisted there could be no tax increases in the deficit reduction plan. Zero. During one Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked whether they would accept a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. All said no.

Since April, Harry Reid has been trying to form a conference committee so that the House and Senate can work out a budget compromise. The Republicans have refused to appoint their conferees, preferring to wait until they had the “leverage” of a government shutdown and debt default. The point here is exactly what Chait said above: to extort concessions out of the Democrats without offering any concessions of their own. “OK then, half the ransom” is not a concession, no matter what Ted Cruz says.

5. The principle at stake is majority rule.

I talked about this in detail last week. Speaker Boehner wants to tell the story that the shutdown represents a disagreement between two branches of government that have conflicting popular mandates: The public elected President Obama, but it also elected a Republican House of Representatives.

That’s not what this is about at all. If it were, Boehner could bring the Senate’s clean continuing resolution to the House floor for a vote and defeat it. He can’t do that, because given the chance the people’s representatives would pass it. In blocking that resolution, Boehner does not represent the majority of the House, he only represents “the majority of the majority”, i.e. a minority.

The entire give-us-what-we-want-or-we’ll-burn-the-house-down strategy is against all American ideals of democracy. The constitutional way to pass a law (or repeal a law you don’t like) is to do what the Democrats did to pass ObamaCare in the first place: Win not just a majority in the House, but also a substantial majority in the Senate (to overcome a filibuster, which the Founders never envisioned), and win the White House (to avoid a veto). The Republicans can’t do that, because they are a minority. (Even their House candidates collectively got a million fewer votes than the Democrats in 2012.)

6. Don’t believe the leak that John Boehner won’t allow a debt-ceiling default.

Thursday the NYT quoted multiple anonymous Republican congressmen saying that Boehner had told them he wouldn’t allow a default. But Matt Yglesias points out that Boehner has been saying such things all along, while also saying the opposite.

Boehner’s position, dating back to 2011, has been twofold. On the one hand he says that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be catastrophic and that he favors avoiding catastrophe. On the other hand he says that he requires unrelated public policy concessions in order to agree to a measure that he himself says he supports.

It is, in other words, the classic suicide hostage strategy: Do what I want or I’ll detonate the bomb strapped to my chest. This has always been Boehner’s position.

For example, on Friday Boehner said:

I don’t believe that we should default on our debt. It’s not good for our country. But after 55 years of spending more than what you bring in, something ought to be addressed. I think the American people expect if we’re going to raise the amount of money we can borrow, we ought to do something about our spending problem and the lack of economic growth in our country.

In other words, he wants concessions. And notice: Boehner doesn’t suggest doing something about the deficit, which has a revenue side. He only wants to discuss “our spending problem”. So he’s seeking spending cuts with no tax increases, the same no-compromise position that doomed the budget negotiations in 2011.

And then Sunday he reiterated:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So under no circumstances will you pass a clean debt limit?

BOEHNER: We’re not going down that path.

Stephanopoulos’ question: “So you sit down with the president. What would you offer him in that conversation?” got no answer. And when pushed on the tax issue Boehner said: “Very simple. We’re not raising taxes.”

He described Harry Reid’s proposal to negotiate about the budget after the shutdown and debt ceiling had been dealt with as

My way or the highway. That’s what he’s saying. Complete surrender and then we’ll talk to you.

So he wants concessions and won’t give anything in return. Without his extortion demand, he has nothing to talk about, so giving it up is “complete surrender”.

7. The clearest head in the room belongs to Elizabeth Warren.

The boogeyman government is like the Boogyman under the bed. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. What is real, what does exist are all those specific important things that we as Americans have chosen to do together through our government. In our democracy, government is not some make-believe thing that has an independent will of its own. In our democracy, government is just how we describe the things that We the People have already decided to do together.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

Countdown to Augustus

October 7, 2013 – 11:53 am

Losing the Republic one day at a time

About once a year, I recommend that Sift readers take a look at Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series of novels. It covers the final century of the Roman Republic, from the rise of Gaius Marius to the establishment of the Empire under Caesar Augustus. I recommend the series not just because it’s a good yarn (which it is), but because it’s a cautionary tale about how republics are lost.

Your high school world history class probably gave you a highlight-reel version of the fall of the Roman Republic — crossing the Rubicon and all that — but didn’t really cover the century-long erosion of public trust that made the big rockslides inevitable.

The highlight reel may have left you with the impression that at a few key moments, individuals failed or made bad, self-serving decisions: If Cicero and Cato had carried the day, if Julius Caesar didn’t march on Rome, if Octavian had restored the power of the Senate after Actium rather than becoming Emperor… everything would have worked out. And so people who apply the Roman model to the American Republic usually end up matching personalities: Who is our Caesar, our Cicero, our Brutus? Is there a parallel between FDR’s four terms and Marius’ seven consulships? Between the assassinations of the Kennedies and of the Gracchi brothers? And so on.

That’s a fun party conversation for history geeks, but the closer (and scarier) match is in the steady erosion of political norms.

As Chris Hayes has observed on several occasions (at around the 3:30 mark here, for example), republics don’t work just by rules, the dos and don’t explicitly spelled out in their constitutions. They also need norms, things that are technically within the rules — or at least within the powers that the rules establish — but “just aren’t done” and arouse public anger when anyone gets close to doing them. But for that public anger, you can often get an advantage by skirting the norms. And when it looks like you might get away with it, the other side has a powerful motivation to cut some other corner to keep you in check.

For the last few decades, we’ve been in a Romanesque downward spiral of norm-skirting. One side does something that just isn’t done, but calibrates it to avoid a rush of public anger. And the other side responds by doing something else that isn’t (or didn’t used to be) done.

One example has been growing use of the filibuster in the Senate. Once an arcane device that showed up more often in movies than in the Capitol, the filibuster is now in such constant use that journalists now write as if the Constitution required 60 Senate votes to pass a law. The brand new use of the filibuster not just to block the passage of laws but to nullify laws already passed (by blocking appointments to the agencies that enforce those laws) led the Obama administration to push the boundaries of recess appointments, which then led the courts to push the boundaries of their norms against getting involved in political conflicts between the executive and legislative branches.

Another example is impeachment. When Democrats began an impeachment process against President Nixon  in 1974, both parties proceeded somberly and with utmost caution, because the only precedent, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment in 1868, wasn’t something to take pride in. By contrast, the impeachment and trial of President Clinton in 1998-1999 had a circus atmosphere; Republicans were giddy that one of their endless investigations had turned up something they could exaggerate into an impeachable offense. Today, Tea Party Republicans see the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense as a technicality. This August, Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) told his constituents that impeaching President Obama would be a “dream come true” except for the annoying little detail that “you’ve got to have evidence” and he doesn’t have any.

That follows a pattern that a Masters of Rome reader easily recognizes: The rules give an explicit power to some office, along with the implicit duty to wield that power to achieve a particular public purpose. But as the erosion of norms proceeds, the power becomes something the officeholder owns, and can use however he likes. So Congress was given the impeachment power to save the Republic from a president who had been suborned by a foreign power or domestic special interest. But the Tea Party believes a Republican Congress just owns that power to use according to its whims; the hurdle to overcome isn’t assembling the evidence, it’s acquiring the votes.

Similarly, the president has the power to enforce the laws and the Supreme Court has the power to interpret the Constitution. More and more, those institutions are coming to own those powers rather than wield them for a public purpose. So the meaning Constitution’s commerce clause changes from one case to the next, according to the whims of the Court’s conservative majority.

An abuse by one branch legitimizes an abuse by another. Congress’ inability to even compose a new immigration law (much less debate it and bring it to a vote) allows President Obama to be the champion of the popular Dreamers by stretching his powers of prosecutorial discretion. The norms of Congress used to allow simple legislative fixes to complex programs during the implementation phase; even if you opposed a program to begin with, you supported improving it once it was already established in law. But the refusal of the Republican House to allow any changes in ObamaCare short of repeal or sabotage has legitimized Obama in pushing the limits of executive orders.

That also is something an MoR reader will recognize: About half of the erosion in Rome was done by the good guys, in order to seek justice for popular causes that the system had stymied.

And that brings us to the present showdown over funding the government and managing the debt ceiling. Until Newt Gingrich, government shutdowns were glitches: Congress thought it could get the laws passed in time, but something went wrong and the government had to shut down for a day or two until Congress could get it fixed. With Gingrich the government shutdown became a tactic, comparable to a labor strike closing a factory: Give us what we want, or we’ll shut the place down.

In 1995-96, the public recognized that the norms had been violated and reacted with appropriate anger. Gingrich had to back down, and his partner-in-crime Bob Dole was soundly thrashed by Bill Clinton in the next presidential election.

President Bush’s clashes with Democrats in Congress were bitter, but impeachment and shutdown were never serious threats. With the anti-Obama backlash and the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, government shutdown has again become just another tool in the congressional toolbox. And for the first time, threatening the debt ceiling has become a tactic. Both parties had repeatedly postured over the debt ceiling in the past, but in 2011 it was a brand new norm-violation to demand concessions in exchange for allowing the government to pay debts lawfully incurred. Obama blundered by not standing on principle then, and so we are where we are.

Later today I’ll have more to say about where that is, but right now I just want to point out where it fits in the larger pattern. The Republicans have President Obama in a Roman-style box: He can surrender to this new minority-rule tactic with the prospect of more surrenders in the future, or he can watch havoc unleashed on the financial markets, with unpredictable effects on the American economy, or he can break the norms himself by invoking the 14th Amendment or minting a trillion-dollar coin or choosing which of Congress’s contradictory laws (the appropriations bills or the debt ceiling) he will enforce.

In the short run, the third choice — find your own norms to violate — does the least damage to the country.  But it keeps the countdown-to-Augustus clock ticking. As Congress becomes increasingly dysfunctional, as it sets up more and more of these holding-the-country-hostage situations, presidents will feel more and more justified in cutting Congress out of the picture.

We know where that goes: Eventually the Great Man on Horseback appears and relieves us of the burden of Congress entirely. He may come from either the Left or the Right, but when he arrives the people will cheer — as the people cheered first Julius Caesar and then Caesar Augustus — because the trust they have placed in the Republic has been so badly abused.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (17)

Tea Trek: Into Darkness

September 30, 2013 – 12:08 pm

The same people who told us a government shutdown couldn’t happen are now sure we’ll avoid a debt-ceiling crisis.

Unless a miracle occurs, the lights go off at midnight.

This week we got to see House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly flummoxed by events that played out in an utterly predictable way: Tea Partiers in the House refused to fund the government without killing ObamaCare. (Delaying it is just killing it in stages. If threatening a government shutdown or a debt-ceiling catastrophe can get it delayed this year, delaying it further can be an annual ransom demand for as long as Republicans have a majority in the House or 41 seats in the Senate.) Democrats in the Senate refused to let a minority party (even the Republicans in the House represent a minority of the voters) repeal laws.

And so the government will shut down at midnight.

For weeks, pundits have been telling us it wouldn’t come to this. No one could lay out a plausible alternate scenario, but it just wouldn’t happen. Boehner or somebody would pull a rabbit out of this hat and the government would get funded, like it (almost) always does.

Now the same pundits are telling us that a short shutdown won’t be that bad, and it really, really won’t come to a debt-ceiling default.*

However, the same configuration holds: House Tea Partiers insist on killing ObamaCare and Senate Democrats refuse to let a minority party repeal laws.

Late last week, several talking heads I usually agree with (like Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein) were even rooting for a shutdown, under the theory (as Rachel Maddow summarized it) that Republicans would “get their ya-yas out” and then be more reasonable about the debt ceiling. I think this view projects too much rationality onto the Tea Partiers. More likely, they will look at a government shutdown and say, “Look what we can do if we stick together and refuse to compromise! On to the debt ceiling! Obama may not be caving in yet, but he’ll really have to surrender then!”

As Rick Perlstein wrote Wednesday:

Despite a continuous flow of examples to the contrary this spring, summer and, now, autumn, our side keeps on wishfully, willfully and rather ignorantly denying the plain evidence in front of their faces about how conservative politics works. Namely, I keep seeing predictions that this, that or the other signal from polls or the political establishment or a traumatized public will “finally” “break the spell” of right-wing extremism on a certain issue, or even on all issues—and then we see that prediction spectacularly fail.

We can’t keep on going this way, my friend. You have to finally come to terms with how conservatism works. Now, that guy in the White House, Obama—I’ve given up hope that he’ll ever get it. I still have faith in you, though. Stop judging conservative by the logic of “normal” politics, or by the epistemology of the world as you, a liberal, understand it. Or as Poli Sci 101 understands it. Every time you do that, you denude us of strength for the fight. Grasp the right on its own terms. Stop trying to make it make sense on your own.

Jonathan Chait followed Perlstein’s lead in a fascinating-but-scary post on Friday.

Chait sees the current showdown in terms of a prophetic article “2012 or Never” that he wrote a year and a half ago during the Republican primary campaign. The Right was being unusually hysterical in 2012 — the same Mitt Romney who had been the conservative alternative to John McCain in 2008 was now far too moderate, despite having moved further the the right in the meantime — because it could feel the country slipping away from its control forever. Every cycle, it saw the electorate become less white, more secular, and less homophobic. Young voters and new citizens were breaking decisively against it.

Gay-bashing and immigrant-bashing used to be surefire crowd-pleasers. But now the right-wing populists were being told to tone it down for fear of spooking the independents.

2012 wasn’t just another election, it was the Right’s last chance.

If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.

At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

Rebuild or dig in? After 2012’s decisive loss, number-crunching Republican consultants like Karl Rove preached adjustment: Soft-pedal the now unpopular social issues, placate the growing Hispanic bloc with immigration reform, reach out to young voters. Younger conservative pundits have imagined a Republican Party that offers right-leaning solutions to the problems of working poor, the struggling middle class, and those without health insurance, a party that has its own plan to deal with climate change, rather than denying the ever-increasing scientific consensus. Bobby Jindal fantasizes about not being “the stupid party” any more.

But it hasn’t gone that way, has it?

Instead of seeking to rebuild a majority, the Right now boldly seeks to rule from the minority. Their strategy is to gerrymander, block any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, suppress voter turnout, and double down on the white vote. The Hastert Rule, that a bill won’t come to the floor of the House for a vote unless it has “a majority of the majority”, is a prescription for minority rule: A majority can be 51%, and a majority-of-the-majority can be 26%. LIkewise, the increasing abuse of the filibuster in the Senate allows 41% of the Senate (which might represent a much smaller percentage of voters, since Utah gets the same number of senators as California) to thwart the will of the majority.

Rick Perlstein points out that there is another scenario for the youth vote other than the left-turn predicted by Peter Beinart:

So let’s assume Beinart is right in his generational diagnosis: kids who came to their maturity during the “Age of Fail,” whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed, and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it.

If that is so, another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

This is the future the Republican Party is currently seeking.

Down with democracy. Much of the Republican rhetorical response to the 2012 loss wasn’t to learn lessons from the voters, but to disparage American democracy entirely. Building on Romney’s famous 47% argument, apologists for Romney’s loss (including Romney himself) argued that the United States had reached a “tipping point” where an electoral majority is dependent on government, and so will automatically vote for the Democrats.

Follow that thought to its logical conclusion: Elections are now illegitimate if the Democrat wins.

Friday Chait observed how this is playing out:

Paul Ryan candidly explained the calculation: “The reason this debt limit fight is different is, we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves. We are stuck with this government another three years.” This is a remarkable confession. Republicans need to compel Obama to accept their agenda, not in spite of the fact that the voters rejected it at the polls but precisely for that reason.

People who think this way are not going to change their minds when they see the polls turn against them. Quite the opposite, if Republicans become convinced that they will lose their House majority in 2014, that will make Tea Partiers all the more determined to have the decisive confrontation now.

Why ObamaCare? Why now? Sometimes, Ted Cruz claims he is representing the American people when he fights to repeal ObamaCare. But sometimes another agenda comes out:

No major entitlement, once it has been implemented, has ever been unwound. If we don’t do it now, in all likelihood we never will.

Again, that’s Chait’s now-or-never logic. And the threat it acknowledges is that once Americans see ObamaCare in action, they will like it. But there’s a deeper level to see than that: Cruz’s argument only makes sense if he’d like to repeal other entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, but can’t because they’re popular. This is an example of what Perlstein calls “time-biding”, in which conservatives pretend to support a popular program until they’re in a position to scuttle it.

Conservatives are time-biders. … They could not survive as a political tendency unless they clothed reaction in liberal raiment. You’ve seen that happen over and over again—like when people like Grover Norquist, whose aim is to roll back the entire welfare state, including Social Security, says what he’s really trying to do is save Social Security.

Where does it end? I have a prognosticating principle for situations like this: When a situation can only end one way, it will end that way — no matter how implausible that may look.

Tea Partiers will not back down. As Chait observes, Obama can’t back down either. Otherwise he is ratifying minority rule into the future. What he doesn’t surrender in this hostage crisis, conservatives will demand in the next one. And as elections are increasingly nullified by minority-rule tactics, the voters Democrats depend on for their future majorities will tune politics out. The Republicans’ whole 2012-or-never problem might go away.

So we’re on track for a debt-ceiling default. The only way out I can see is for Boehner and a handful of House Republicans to join Democrats in passing a clean debt-ceiling increase. Under the current balance of forces that can’t happen, because Boehner is afraid of losing the Speakership and the Republicans who might join him are afraid of Tea Party primary challengers.

What could change that calculation? The business community could change it. But why would they? A stock market crash could put the fear of God into them.

That’s what happened in the TARP vote in 2008. Bush administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke went to Congress and more-or-less said the financial markets would melt down without the $700 billion bailout package. The House voted it down anyway on September 29, and the next day the Dow dropped 777 points. The House passed TARP on October 3, after 57 representatives changed their minds.

I don’t know whether to expect that crash before or after we hit the debt ceiling. (As I write this, the Dow is drifting downward, but not crashing.) But I don’t see any other way out of this scenario.

* There’s been a lot of confusion about what this means, and this is one of the rare occasions where the media’s both-sides-do-it trope is really true. Republicans minimize the effects (building on their unfounded belief that vast amounts of wasteful government spending could just not be paid out without hurting anybody), while Democrats jump straight to defaulting on government bonds, which would send the world economy into chaos. A clearer picture is presented in slides put together by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

When the government can no longer borrow money, it will have to make do with the revenue coming in. Currently, that would mean cutting government spending by an average of 32%, though it would be more complicated than that because both expenditures and revenues are “lumpy”; it’s not like 68% of expenditures comes in every day. It’s also not clear how much the economic effects of a debt-ceiling breach would decrease revenue.

Interest payments on the debt average about 6% of the federal budget, so they could probably be made (despite the lumpiness) if the Treasury prioritized those obligations over, say, Social Security checks, disaster relief, supporting our troops in the field, and all the other obligations of the federal government. However, it’s not clear whether anybody has the constitutional authority to make choices like that. Up until now, a US government obligation has been as good as gold, whether it was a bond or a procurement contract or a pension. Appropriation bills and entitlement programs are laws, after all. If the law says a payment is to be made, who has the authority to say otherwise?

So the economic chaos will be compounded by legal chaos, as everyone whose payments are delayed sues. Who then can predict what the courts will do with those suits, or what the Treasury will do with whatever court orders it gets?

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Pots, Kettles, and Projections from the Religious Right

September 23, 2013 – 11:48 am

Unlike Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut or Newt Gingrich labeling Barack Obama “the Food Stamp President“, I don’t think Stephen Baskerville was trolling when he delivered the annual mandatory-attendance Faith and Reason Lecture ten days ago at Patrick Henry College. On the contrary, I think this was one of those among-the-faithful communications that Alternet’s Amanda Marcotte says the rest of us should be paying more attention to.

Several other writers — at first former PHC students like QueerPHC and David Sessions, then others — have already picked out the outrageous highlights of Baskerville’s speech: gays are responsible for the rise Nazism, prisons are overcrowded because feminists “invented crimes” to control men, sex education is “government-sponsored pornography”, the welfare state caused the financial crisis, and on and on. It’s hard to read more than a paragraph of Baskerville’s text without finding something objectionable.

But I want to back up a step, look at the speech as a whole, and consider what it tells us about the extreme Christianist* mindset. Religious-Right writings are often unintentionally revealing, because of a unique dogmatic quirk: To look at their own worldview as if it were one belief system among many is to commit the sin of relativism.

Self-awareness. People of all religions and philosophies find it hard to “see ourselves as others see us”, but most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we should. On the Religious Right, though, it’s not just hard to look at your faith from the outside, it’s wrong. (Something similar happens on the political Right with “American exceptionalism”; it’s not just difficult for Americans to see the United States as a nation among other nations, it’s a mistake that should be rejected out of hand.)

This dogmatic quirk has a predictable result: Religious Right speakers and authors have a profound lack of self-awareness. When anybody else would stop and think, “Whoa. What did I just hear come out of my mouth?” Christianist extremists like Stephen Baskerville reject that self-criticism as the voice of the Devil and say “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

That lack of self-awareness is exacerbated when Christianists segregate themselves behind the walls of an institution in which “our Christian faith precedes and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study, teach, and learn.” Now imagine being a voice of authority in such a place, where those who disagree with you are not just mistaken, they are a corrupting influence on the entire community. What kind of unchecked nonsense would get into your head?

Projection. People who lack self-awareness are prone to what psychologists call projection — their repressed self-criticism doesn’t just evaporate, it comes out as criticism of others. Projection is why liars don’t trust anybody and gossips believe everyone is talking about them. Projection is why puritans imagine that everyone else is obsessed with sex, and ideologues see themselves beset by everyone else’s ideology.

That’s what’s going on in this speech,”Politicizing Potiphar’s Wife: Today’s New Ideology“. Baskerville is pointing to what he sees as an important problem in American society today: Ideologues are politicizing sex and the family.

Where, oh where, might he look to see such a phenomenon?

The setting. As you read the speech, keep in mind that Baskerville isn’t one of those unfortunate professors who had an ill-considered ramble recorded on somebody’s iPhone and posted to the world.

Patrick Henry College is the intellectual center of the evangelical Christian home-schooling movement**. It’s the subject of Hanna Rosin’s book God’s Harvard: a Christian College on a mission to save America. The school’s purpose is to take home-schooled evangelicals and groom them for positions in politics and government. It was a disproportionate source of Bush administration interns.

The Faith and Reason Lecture highlights an annual day-long festival and student attendance is mandatory. The PHC web site quotes its provost:

To me, the Faith & Reason festival exemplifies what Patrick Henry College is all about: committed Christians pursuing the highest level of academic scholarship.

David Sessions recalls that the original Faith and Reason lecture in 2005 was pre-screened by the college president and presented only after numerous changes. So he finds it “difficult to imagine” that Baskerville’s speech was not endorsed by the administration.

Ideology. The “ideologies” Baskerville warns his students against are feminism (renamed “sexual radicalism” or “sexualityism”) and Islamism. He never defines ideology, but he explicitly denies that Christianity can be an ideology.

One obvious reason why Christian faith is not an ideology is because of its unique and highly qualified relationship with the state; Christianity does not augment state power but limits it. Yet equally plausible is that Christianity is not an ideology because it has a unique theology of resentment. All true ideologies channel grievances into government power, with the ultimate aim of settling scores against politically defined criminals. Christianity alone offers a theology of forgiveness that neutralizes resentment and channels its sources into service for others and for God.

I’m sure that women forced to have unwanted vaginal probes or scientists who have to fight for their right to teach science in public schools will be comforted to learn that Christianity does not augment state power. LIkewise, I’m sure people who knew and loved Dr. George Tiller appreciate the Religious Right’s forgiving nature. And all you have to do is finish reading Baskerville’s speech to find a litany of Christianist resentment and grievance, a topic I have written about at length elsewhere. You will search in vain to find any hint of Baskerville neutralizing his resentment or channeling it into service — he can’t neutralize his own resentment and grievance because that only exists in other people.

Having defended against self-awareness, he goes on to express clear insight into resentment:

resentment is simply the form of pride that is directed at those possessing power that we feel we deserve.

Just so, Stephen. Just so.

Ending disagreement. Since Baskerville doesn’t define ideology, the only way to know what he means is to watch how he uses it. We’ve already seen that Christianity isn’t an ideology. Further “Ideology is a defining feature of modernity” that didn’t exist until it was invented, along with other modern notions like political parties, the left-right spectrum, and progress.

What he’s actually pointing to is ideological conflict: two or more ideologies co-existing in the same society. That really is a feature of modernity. Christianity by itself doesn’t lead to ideological conflict, but a Christianist society that lets Islam or feminism into the public square does have ideological conflict. If only we could get back to a society where Christianity is the only ideology and all other views are aberrations, then we could ignore the existence of ideology altogether. That seems to be his goal.

My argument is not that we must win the ideological wars but that we should be endeavouring to put the ideological genie back into the bottle.

Freedom is slavery. Slavery is freedom. Baskerville admiringly quotes Puritan minister John Geree from 1641:

There is a service which is freedom, the service of Christ; and there is a freedom which is servitude, the freedom to sin. There is a liberty which is bondage and … a bondage which is liberty.

This Orwellian principle explains how PHC can advocate repressive policies against women, gays, and non-Christians under the college slogan “for Christ and for Liberty”. Forcing others to live by Religious Right principles “liberates” them from the bondage of sin. Conversely,

sin enslaves and license destroys freedom.

The frame here is addiction: When your child is addicted to heroin, you may be justified in locking him up until he finishes going through withdrawal. (He may thank you later, once the craving is gone.) If you apply that model to, say, homosexuality, you are justified in packing your kid off to an ex-gay camp to be deprogrammed.

In the larger world, Christianists picture themselves in the parental role and see the rest of us as addicted to sin. This frame justifies them in seizing whatever power they need to make us behave, all in the name of “liberty”.

This view has become part of the conservative mainstream. In the 2012 campaign, for example, Rick Santorum redefined the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights as “God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. [my emphasis] That’s what the moral foundation of our country is.” So gays, feminists, and Muslims can be enemies of freedom, but by definition true Christians cannot.

Tactics for seizing power. Once you put aside the dodge that Baskerville is talking about other people, his criticisms are right on target.

What Gottschalk has stumbled upon is our own homegrown version of Stalinism: the process by which triumphant radicals first challenge and then commandeer both traditional values and the instruments of state repression for their own purposes as they trade ideological purity for power.

Quite right, Prof. Baskerville: America does have a movement that justifies its quest for power by commandeering “traditional values”.

The new ideology uses sexuality — and also its products, children — as instruments to acquire political power. … If one wishes to enact measures that intrude into the private lives of adults, the way to neutralize opposition is to present it as being “for the children.”

Indeed. Christianist attempts to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying the people they love are typically framed as a defense of children. Similarly, the government must intrude into what you read or see on TV or on the internet to protect children.

Baskerville understands that other people’s obsessive focus on sex is bad for society.

It is unhealthy for any society to have its civic life so dominated by sex as ours has now become. When sex becomes a society’s political currency, the public agenda comes to be controlled by those willing to use sexuality as a weapon to acquire power.

A good example of this would be how Republicans used ban-gay-marriage ballot proposals to boost evangelical turnout in key swing states in 2004.

The Hungarian Stalinist Matyas Rakosi coined the term “salami tactics” to describe how determined, disciplined, and organized activists can seize power by wheedling their way into key institutions, such as the police, justice system, penal apparatus, and military.

Baskerville could be describing the mission of Patrick Henry College itself.

The Vision of Patrick Henry College is to aid in the transformation of American society by training Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for righteousness, justice, and mercy, through careers of public service and cultural influence.

Later in the speech, Baskerville applies a military analogy to PHC.

This “university” is tiny, but so was the army of Gideon.

And the Bolsheviks. Don’t forget the Bolsheviks.

Grievances. If your plan is to “channel grievances into government power”, then you have to be able to manufacture grievances.

Here too, we also see the familiar pattern of radical ideologies creating the very evils they then re-package as grievances, and which then serve to rationalize further “empowerment”.

Who manufactures more grievances than the Religious Right, with its imaginary War on Christmas and its belief that its religious freedom has been violated whenever it is not allowed to rule over everyone else?

Invented crimes. Baskerville spends a great deal of time talking about “new crimes” that come from looking at the world through a feminist lens: He puts scare quotes around “rape”, “harassment”, “child abuse”, “stalking”, and “bullying”. (I won’t detail this because Libby Anne already has.)

But he ignores new crimes like fetal homicide, which have been foisted upon us by the Religious Right, or the proposal that Virginia women report their miscarriages to the police within 24 hours. Failure to report could lead to a year in prison.

Not hypocrisy. The temptation is to label this kind of double-standard-keeping as hypocrisy. But it’s stranger than that: The Religious Right isn’t hypocritical, it is just profoundly lacking in self-awareness. They really have no idea that the criticisms they aim outward apply more accurately to themselves.

And how would they? In order to see how their criticisms apply to their own actions, they’d have to consider their worldview as one among many. And to them, that’s relativism. It’s just wrong.

* I use Christianist in the same sense that the mainstream media uses Islamist. I am not talking about all Christians, but specifically about those who believe that their particular version of Christianity should control the government, and especially those who are working to achieve that goal.

** It’s not my intention to smear home-schooling in general. I know more than one home-schooling household personally and I have participated in a few of their projects. Parents might home-school to deal with special needs, to be more involved in their children’s lives, to nurture special talents, to escape bullying, or for many other benign or admirable reasons.

But Christian home-schooling often has an additional goal: “protecting” children from learning about evolution, homosexuality, or feminism, or hearing any cogent criticism of a fundamentalist worldview. The more radical a Christianist group is, the more likely it is to advocate home-schooling.

A report by the National Center for Education Statistics said 1.5 million American children were being home-schooled in 2007 (up from 1.1 million in 2003), with 72% of parents citing “religious or moral instruction” as a reason. Not all of those folks are radical Christian supremacists, but given growth and whatnot we still might be talking about a million kids.

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Hunger Games: Who’s Right About Food Stamps?

September 23, 2013 – 9:02 am

Beyond the anecdotes about lazy surfers and hungry kids, where do the savings really come from?

Thursday, the House passed a bill to spend $39 billion less on Food Stamps (than current law would spend) over the next ten years. All Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against it, but it passed 217-210. President Obama has pledged to veto it, but before it reaches his desk it still has to be reconciled with the Senate farm bill, which cuts Food Stamps by $4 billion.

Image vs. fact. The public debate around Food Stamp cuts has consisted almost entirely of imagery. Fox News’ hour-long special “The Great Food Stamps Binge” anointed lobster-buying surfer-musician Jason Greenslate “the new face of Food Stamps”, while MSNBC focused on kids and military families. Ezra Klein interviewed author and ex-sergeant Kayla Williams about growing up on Food Stamps, and quoted a blog post by an unemployed Afghanistan veteran currently receiving Food Stamps.

Each image is moving in its own way, but how well do any of them represent reality?

First, let’s establish some facts: We’re talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which cost the government $74.6 billion in FY 2012. As of last September, 47.7 million Americans — about 1 in 7 — were receiving SNAP benefits that averaged $134 a month. To be eligible for SNAP, your income must be lower than 130% of the poverty level, or about $30,000 for a family of four.

As you can see from the chart, the percentage of the population getting SNAP benefits fluctuated with the business cycle until Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, then started increasing again when the 2002 Farm Bill loosened up eligibility. (The anomaly in the chart is the increase during the “Bush Boom” of 2002-2006.) It really took off when the Great Recession hit in 2008. Recently, the number of households receiving SNAP has roughly matched the USDA estimate of the number of households that are “food insecure”. Both numbers jumped between 2007 and 2009, and both are currently about 1 in 7.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the number of recipients would go back down to 34 million by 2023 even with no changes in eligibility. (I’d guess that follows from the assumption that the economy goes back to normal by then.) Benefits were increased in the stimulus bill of 2009, and those increases (a little less than 6%) will run out this November. (That’s already baked into the numbers and does not figure in the $39 billion of cuts.)

Lost in most of the discussion is the question of where the estimated $39 billion savings comes from. Anecdotes or even averages about SNAP recipients are meaningless in this discussion unless they apply specifically to the people who will lose their benefits.

The detailed CBO estimates show that most of the provisions of the House bill have little impact on cost. (It didn’t even bother to figure the savings from Section 110, “Ending supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits for lottery or gambling winners.”) The entire $39 billion comes from three changes.

Work requirements. The biggest chunk, $19 billion, come from Section 109, “Repeal of state work program waiver authority.” That also accounts for the most immediate impact: $3.3 billion in FY 2015.

This sounds like the waivers in welfare work requirements that Mitt Romney so brazenly misrepresented in 2012, but it’s actually different. The SNAP rules say that able-bodied adults without children are limited to receiving 3 months of SNAP benefits every 3 years, unless they are spending at least 20 hours a week either working or participating in a job training program. The 1996 law that established that requirement allowed governors to apply for waivers if their states had high unemployment, figuring that it’s not fair to require hungry people to work if there are no jobs. That’s what’s being repealed.

That change shouldn’t affect any children, but it should cut off both Fox’s freeloading surfer and MSNBC’s unemployed Afghanistan veteran. (I didn’t find national estimates, but adults without children who don’t work 20 hours a week are about 8% of SNAP recipients in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News. ) How you feel about it largely depends on which one you think is more typical. I suspect the vet is more typical, but I don’t really know.

How you feel also depends on your mercy/severity bias. Some people would gladly feed ten freeloaders to save one person from going hungry through no fault of his or her own. Others feel justified in cutting off ten hungry innocents to force one Jason Greenslate back into the job market.

Categorical eligibility. The second biggest savings, $11.6 billion ($1.3 billion in 2015), comes from Section 105, “Updating Program Eligibility”, which eliminates something known as “categorical eligibility”. CE amounts to the idea that if you’ve already qualified for one needs-based government program, you can qualify automatically for some others, even if the eligibility requirements don’t match perfectly. This saves overhead costs for the government and shortens the lag time of waiting for your paperwork to go through, at the cost of giving benefits to people who might make a little more than 130% of the poverty level.

So the main folks this hurts are the working poor, those lucky couples with kids who get SNAP even though they make slightly over $30,000 a year. It hits them in multiple ways, because qualifying for SNAP can also automatically qualify their kids for free school lunches. Bread for the World estimates that 2-3 million people will lose SNAP benefits if CE is eliminated, and that 280,000 children will lose free school lunches. (It’s tricky, but not impossible, to make that estimate match the CBO’s $1.3 billion. Using the $133-a-month average benefit, we’d be talking about 10 million person-months. That could be 2 million people getting SNAP for an average of five months each during a year. My best guess, though, is that we’re more likely talking about 1 million people, with the other 1-2 million losing benefits only briefly while they re-apply and re-qualify.)

Heat and eat. $8.7 billion in savings ($840 million in 2015) doesn’t actually concern food at all. It comes from eliminating the so-called “Heat and Eat” program, through which SNAP recipients can get assistance paying their utility bills. Bloomberg’s article says this would affect 850,000 people currently getting about $90 a month. (Again, I think you make that work with the $840-million-a-year CBO estimate by assuming not everybody gets assistance for the full 12 months.)

So that’s the whole $39 billion right there. Everything else in the bill is window dressing. For example, drug-testing recipients — which the House bill does not mandate but allows states to do — will almost certainly cost the government more for the tests than it can save by denying benefits to drug users. That was already true when Florida tried it for welfare applicants, and since SNAP benefits-per-person are much less, the loss should be even bigger.

Dependence. The Republican rhetoric on this issue revolves around the word dependence: dependence on government, creating dependence, and so on. The implicit assumption is that people who are getting aid would otherwise take matters in hand somehow. (And that we would approve of how they did it. After all, isn’t Breaking Bad the story of a man realizing that no one is going to help him and taking matters in hand?) And that in turn is based on the assumption that poverty is caused by poor people; if they’d just get out and work, they wouldn’t be poor. A third assumption is that it’s OK for children to suffer for the misbehavior of their parents; seeing their children hungry is part of what’s supposed to motivate the poor not to be poor.

I see two things going on here. First, what I like to call the Musical Chairs Fallacy, which is a version of the Composition Fallacy. If a particular child is always the first one out in musical chairs, you could train him/her to be quicker and more alert. But if you trained all the kids, someone would still be the first one out, because there aren’t enough chairs.

Similarly, you can imagine individual parents watching their children plead for more food and getting a burst of desperate energy that propels them into jobs they might otherwise not have found. But if all the poor get desperate at once, will that desperation create enough jobs to feed all their children? Or are a certain number of people going to go out of the game when the music stops (no matter how quick or alert everyone is) because there aren’t enough chairs?

Second, there’s the problem of the working poor. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage is lower than it was when I made it back in the 1970s.

And our economy is creating more and more part-time and minimum-wage jobs. The increasing numbers of people on food stamps is how we’re dealing with those trends. If you’re working 30 hours a week at WalMart, you can’t feed your kids. Politicians who are against raising the minimum wage and also against Food Stamps need to spell out their plan for those kids.

Summing up. The $39 billion saved by the House bill comes from three places: Cutting off benefits for unemployed adults without kids and trusting that they will find legal jobs rather than go hungry or turn to crime; stopping benefits for the working poor who make slightly too much money; and poor families being hotter in the summer and colder in the winter.

What’s next? The Senate passed much smaller Food Stamp cuts (about $4 billion over ten years) back in June. That was part of a bipartisan farm bill that got 48 Democratic and 18 Republican votes. Now the House and Senate have to meet in a conference committee to work out a compromise bill, though it’s hard to imagine what that might look like. Like all the other spending bills that are hung up in this Congress, it has an October 1 deadline.

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