Elsewhere: SCOTUS, ALEC, ACA, more

I did a radio spot on KPCC today on the question of whether Justices should retire strategically or not, and also on term limits for SCOTUS. I'm still ambivalent on the latter; I think the last time I wrote about it I bailed by saying that since staggered 18 year terms aren't going to happen, I don't need a position on it. On balance, I think I'm perhaps a bit more for than against, but I'm really undecided. On the main point, however, I think it's pretty clear that if older justices want to preserve the principles they believe in during a time of strong partisan polarization, then they should retire strategically. Which means Ginsburg and Breyer should retire now -- if they care about what they've worked for, as oppose to caring about doing the work. If you want to listen, the link will be here when they post it.

Other recent ones:

ALEC and democracy

No, a Republican president won’t sabotage Obamacare. Well, mostly not.

One more time: The bottom line on government-funding deadlines

Obamacare and 2014

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Michael Dorn, 61.

Good stuff:

1. Interesting point (and interesting data) about democracy and constitutions, from Xavier Marquez.

2. As regulars know, I'm quick to think the worst of Newt Gingrich, so I have to pay attention when Ta-Nehisi Coates approves of something he does.

3. Joshua Tucker reminds us to be cautious of "great man" theories.

4. While Stephen Benedict Tyson reminds us that sometimes, individual characteristics and choices matter. Both are right!

5. Want ACA stats? Kaiser has them.

6. Is there really going to be a permanent doc fix? Sarah Kliff reports.

7. And a great quote on parties from the 19th century, via Seth Masket.

Why We Get Majorities Wrong

Matt Glassman comments on my earlier post on majorities:

I totally understand why people are so keen to get rid of the filibuster. I cannot for the life of me understand why --- given the shining example of majority-rule just a football field south of the Senate --- they do not understand that there are both positive and negative consequences to doing so.

I think I know the answer to this one, although I'll admit it's speculative. And the answer is...political culture. Or, if you prefer, poor education.

Basically, there's incredibly widespread belief about two things in the US, one which confuses us and one which is just plain false:

1. Democracy is the best system of government (sometimes, but not always, with the Churchill qualifier; sometimes, especially these days among conservatives, with an essentially nonsense distinction between "republic" and "democracy"); and,

2.  In democracies, decisions are made by majority vote.

That the first of these is virtually uncontested winds up with everyone believing that whatever reforms they support make things more democratic. This matters because it gets in the way of clear thinking about what democracy actually is, since it becomes whatever it is we think best. It is, however, not actually true. Some of us have other things we care about; for example, we might care more about policy outcomes than the system of government that achieves them. It's OK that we're not all committed to democracy above all else; it would help us talk about this stuff if we were willing to accept that (and, in turn, accept that democracy isn't all "[t]he good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day").

The second one is just plain wrong. At best, a pure, strict, majoritarian democracy is one of the many varieties of democracy, and not one that many democratic theorists (or, for that matter, democratic polities) actually subscribe to. But there are plenty of other forms of democracy. As always, I turn to Hannah Arendt on the difference between majority decision and majority rule:

...we commonly equate and confound majority rule with majority decision.  The latter, however, is a technical device...In America, at any rate [the Constitution was] framed with the express and conscious intention to prevent, as far as humanly possible, the procedures of majority decisions from generating into the "elective despotism" of majority rule (On Revolution, 164-165, or at least it was in the old editions).

We adopt the "technical device" of majority voting often -- not always -- because it works well enough in many instances. That's just fine. But thinking that the goal is majority rule, and that the job of democratic design is to find procedures to empower one particular majority as much as possible, is totally backwards.

None of which is to say whether majority voting is appropriate in any particular situation, or to ignore that the Constitution has plenty of anti-majoritiarian mechanisms which certainly matter in the question of what Senate procedures are more or less democratic. It's just that I think basic democratic (mis)education in the US far too often equates democracy with majority rule, and leaves people believing that these questions are obvious and easy.*

The truth? Democracy doesn't always produce the substantive outcomes we want. And: democracy is more complex than just taking a vote and whoever gets the most votes, wins. That your grade school teachers (and, I'm afraid, many of your college professors) didn't explain that to you is too bad, but it is nevertheless the truth.




*OK, I spent way to much time trying to work "lie to me" into that paragraph, and I'll just settle for this footnote...basically, we watched that episode again last night, and as usual it's with me all day today. My apologies.

Majorities

Ezra Klein writes last week (my emphasis):

So the question here isn't so much about the change in power now as it is in the change in power over time. That change doesn't clearly favor Democrats or Republicans. Rather, it favors majorities over minorities. And a corrective on that front has been overdue for decades. The only thing worse than a Senate where the majority has the power to govern is one where it doesn't.

I'm going to keep banging this one in, because it's terribly important. Removing the filibuster doesn't favor "majorities." It favors one particular majority. Not a policy majority. The party majority.

Remember, nominations that the majority party in the Senate opposes won't necessarily make it to the Senate floor in the first place, even if they would actually win if they came to a vote. Indeed, one can imagine a House-like Senate refusing to bring nominees up for a vote unless a majority of the majority party favors it.

"Majorities"? There's a majority right now for ENDA in the House, most observers believe. There's almost certainly a majority for a Senate-like immigration bill. I suppose it's even possible that there's a majority in the House for some very mild gun legislation. But in a body in which the majority party runs things, those other majorities aren't getting votes.

The thing is that there are multiple majorities on multiple issues at any one time in any legislative chamber. What parties do is structure things so that certain majorities are allowed to express themselves -- and others are suppressed (meaning that in those cases, the minority wins). That's fine; in fact, it's better than fine, since legislatures probably couldn't function very well without that kind of structure. But there's no reason to assume that the party majority is the only majority that matters, or that it's always inherently better (and more democratic) to allow the party to determine which majorities count.

And that's without getting into the more complex question of whether majorities should always win in a democracy. I'm strongly convinced they shouldn't (a classic example is when an indifferent majority is opposed by an intense minority). But put that aside. Again: reforms which favor party leadership simply do not favor chamber majorities in all cases, at any rate. They favor the majority party.

Strict majority party rule is, to be sure, better than strict minority party rule. Or, even worse, the incredibly bizarre situation in which a minority of the minority party intimidates the bulk of that party into doing whatever they say, and then abuses chamber rules to dictate to the majority party some policy which in fact only a slim majority support. So, yes, given the situation, Harry Reid and the Democrats had no choice but to act, and the result is in fact better than what they were faced with. To say that it necessarily empowers majorities, however, is another question altogether.

Consultants and Kludgeocracy

One more on this topic and then I'll let it go. As I said in the Prospect piece, I pretty much agree with Steven Teles in his description of "Kludgeocracy" and the causes for it. 

The one possible exception I have is something pretty important: the outsourcing of government work to outside contractors, particularly in the national security area. Here's Teles:

Finally, kludgeocracy is now self-generating, as its growth has created a "kludge industry" that feeds off the system's appetite for complexity. In the name of markets and innovation, and driven by increasingly strict (and often arbitrary) limits on government personnel, the United States has created what public administrators call a "hollow state," in which core functions of government have been hired out to private contractors, operating under the oversight of increasingly overwhelmed civil servants. Christopher McKenna, in his book The World's Newest Profession, shows that, for over half a century, management consultants brought in to advise governments (at great expense) have — not surprisingly — recommended a greater role for consultants and contractors.

This army of consultants and contractors then became a lobby for even greater transfer of governmental functions to outsiders — including, as Janine Wedel shows in Shadow Elite, the transfer of such core roles as formulating policy recommendations and overseeing contractors. This kludge industry, having pulled the fundamental knowledge needed for government out of the state and into the private sector, has thus made itself nearly indispensable. And with its large, generally non-competitive profits, the kludge industry has significant resources to invest in ensuring that government continues to layer on complex policies, and hence continues to need to purchase more services.

I agree with all of this, and think it's a potentially very big deal, and very bad for US democracy and governance.

What I'm not entirely certain of is that it's similar to other "kludeocracy" examples -- the overly complex health insurance reforms, the climate proposals designed as workarounds when Congress won't co-operate and the courts give some latitude and take other options away, and more.

This one, to me, is at least potentially something that could happen in any system once it starts down the path of outside contractors. And I suspect that the first steps down that path are driven not by a system with lots of veto points, but a combination of voter imperatives and politician incentives: both are driving politicians to find ways to cut government without touching government services.

In other words, it's very possible for me to imagine a US Conservative Party in a Westminster system doing the exact same thing in order to make anti-government conservatives happy without upsetting swing voters. Or even a US Labor Party in a Westminster system, with a Bill Clinton as Prime Minister, doing the same thing in order to be able to brag about ending "big government" without taking any hits for removing actual government services.

Now, on the other hand, as far as I know it hasn't happened elsewhere (has it?). So maybe it is driven by the US system; surely the weaker bureaucracy in the US has fewer tools to resist outsourcing government than stronger bureaucracies elsewhere.

So I'm disagreeing; just raising the question. I'd love to hear some experts chime in on this one. I will say that if it really is an inherent part of the US system under modern conditions, it bothers me quite a bit, certainly more than the occasional government shutdown or even the kludgey ACA.

Kludgeocracy and Representation

My column today over at TAP is an argument with Steven Teles, who has been writing important things about the US policy-making process as a "Kludgeocracy." Generally, I think his diagnosis is correct, including the causes of kludges, but I think it's mostly a good thing, not a bad one. I'm somewhat skeptical about how much of a net bad thing it is in terms of policy efficiency, but I'm confident that it's a good thing in terms of democracy.

I want to highlight my argument about democratic accountability, which Teles argues would be enhanced if "constitutional norms forced government to act directly and transparently or forgo action altogether" because it would be easier to see what government does and therefore easier for voters to reward or punish. Here's my response:

I think this is largely a myth. Modern government, even the streamlined version Teles wants, is still going to do far too many things for this kind of accountability to work. Voters, after all, have only one ballot. They can’t possibly use it to hold politicians accountable for multiple successes and failures, even in the unlikely event that they are attentive enough to properly assess those policies...

On the other hand, kludgeocracy increases accountability—dramatically. Individual politicians have a real opportunity to make significant policy changes on many occasions. The very fact that there’s no one who is “in charge” is exactly what can make it hard for politicians to entirely duck a constituent’s demands. And we have plenty of evidence that politicians do respond to constitution demands, even if failure to do so probably wouldn’t show up as a significant electoral effect.

I really want to emphasize the point that to the extent that democratic accountability is about the voters, it's just an incredibly blunt instrument. Voters, and especially swing voters, simply are not going to flip their votes in most cases over policy choices. Instead, this sort of accountability functions mainly as an imperative to incumbent politicians: avoid doing things that anger voters! That's especially the case with policy outcomes; presidents know, for example, that they really don't want to be up for re-election while the nation is losing a war or suffering through a recession.

(Yes, there's a problem that a lot of liberals worried about in 2012 of incentives for the out-party to deliberately attempt to produce negative policy outcomes, along with sufficient institutional means for the "out"-party to affect policy which the "in" party would then take responsibility for. I tend to think it's a real, albeit overrated problem...but it's not really the problem that Teles is concerned with).

The "no policy disasters!" impulse is a good and healthy one in a democracy. It's crucial. But it's also very, very, limited.

What I think does a lot more of the work of real democracy falls, in my way of thinking of things, under the broad category of representation, which I think is far more more nuanced than electoral accountability. Representation isn't just about policy congruence between representative and constituents. It's also about what those representatives actually spend their time working on -- what they actively attempt to accomplish, as opposed to just how they vote on the House or Senate floor (for more on representation, see here and here). But for that to be meaningful, there has to be more that legislators can do than merely voting. Thus the current US system; thus kludges.

In other words, I believe that what the US system discovered is the incredible capacity of representation; and what that system, with its multiple veto point and initiative points, can do really well is to take advantage of that capacity.

And that's why I care about this argument. To me, the successes of democracy are in large part about groups or even individuals pushing politicians, and politicians responding by making promises and then attempting to carry out those promises. But while everything can't be about individual politicians (and this is on of the reasons that parties are important, and that it's important for parties to be permeable so that newly interested citizens can at least potentially affect party positions on questions of public policy), it's important that those individual politicians do have the tools available to tap into the full capacity of representation.

As I argued in the piece, I'm not even convinced that the resulting messy policy is a net negative. But even if it is, I'm generally willing to accept that price for meaningful democracy.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tim Minear, 50.

Good stuff:

1. Regular readers will know that I strongly agree with Ilya Somin about the words "democracy" and "republic." There are two reasonable choices: treat them as synonyms, which is what we should do in most contexts...or treat them as about the concepts of Athens vs. Rome, which is interesting and all but has nothing at all to do with the USA or any other modern polity. I mean, of course some of our ideas come from Athens and Rome, but our institutions really don't, and can't. See more here -- really the first three, which are all more or less repetitive, but if you go down a bit you'll see a pretty good point about why it might matter if a nation thinks of itself as a Republic, and also some stuff about Palpatine.

2. Joseph Neeley on "The Republican Brian." I'm no expert at this stuff...but my inclination is to believe it's mainly bunk.

3. And Kevin Drum on Medicaid and transferring money from Republican states to Democratic states.

NR Takes on the Radicals (A Little)

Sometimes, the twitter machine just spits out perfect material for items to write. So this morning I wound up opening tabs on Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry's epic (five-screen) condemnation of radical Republicans, along side a nice takedown of Russell Brand's recent political babbling from Alex Massie. One of them was about "an adolescent extremist whose hatred of politics is matched by his ignorance" -- want to guess which one?

OK, it's the one calling all politicians frauds...from the Left, where liberal democracy, including the "left" parties, looks like a conspiracy against the True Revolution. But one could pretty easily write exactly the same critique of Tail Gunner Ted and his radical allies. Of course, the key point is that in the US, the radicals have a powerful hold on one of the major political parties. Which is a bit of a problem.

Massie is far more direct and effective. Does he have the easier target? Not really, but he does have the harder argument, perhaps. After all, Massie doesn't care at all that those sympathetic to Brand will consider him Not Left Enough, but National Review certainly cares a lot about being considered a True Conservative publication.

Indeed, Ponnuru and Lowry's five-screen attack on the radicals is packed full of "on the other hand" and "to be sure" qualifications, so much so that at times it's hard to tell whether the point is convincing convincable conservatives or if it's to do just enough to be able to claim credit for being on the side of sanity. Is that unfair? Perhaps. But there sure are a lot of caveats here. "The tendency arises from legitimate frustrations." "The Republican consultant class has often seemed to suffer from an almost clinical deficit of imagination." "It’s not as if the Republican leadership handled this episode especially well." And they endorse the silly Fox-ready spin during the shutdown, the minibills and the Battles of the World War II Memorials, as "smart tactical moves," while calling the Tea Party "one of the wonders of American politics" which they claim, implausibly, would be impossible anywhere else in the world.

Nevertheless, it's good to see a flat-out attack on the radicals from NR.

Even as qualified and caveated as this one is.

I do think the problem is a bit deeper than Ponnuru and Lowry want to pretend it is. They really only attack the obviously suicidal: the awful Senate candidates, the shutdown strategy that had no chance of victory. Their solution is that the party should work hard to win elections in order to implement their agenda, which is all very well and good. However, it also masks something real going on here. The "True Conservative" agenda that the radicals and most mainstream conservatives claim to want, at this point, has become so radical that it probably is at least a modest electoral problem -- and even more so, it would be a massive governing problem, both in practical and electoral consequences. I'm thinking here about the Ryan Budget, with its complete elimination (if you take the budget math literally, which is what we're supposed to do with budgets) of all non-defense discretionary spending. I'm thinking, too, about the "47%" rhetoric, and about Medicare (and presumably Social Security) "reform." Or about the farm bill, where Ponnuru and Lowry are on the side of the "reformers" and ignore that the main reform in the bill is slashing food stamps.

In other words, really detaching themselves from the radicals and healing the GOP might require some rather more difficult choices for mainstream conservatives than just jettisoning Christine O'Donnell. No matter how enthusiastically and (I suspect) repeatedly they're willing to do that.

Still, it's a start, I guess.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Kevin Kline, 66.

Good stuff:

1. Andrew Sprung argues with me about GOP dysfunction and the Constitution. My point: unless you can show that GOP dysfunction is a consequence of the Constitution or that it is particularly harmful because of the system of separated institutions sharing powers, then you're not making a Constitution argument. I don't believe that the Linz argument does the former, and I disagree that it succeeds on the latter. 

2. Dan Drezner assesses the Obama Administrations motives on Syria policy.

3. And more Colorado politics and parties from Seth Masket. Question: would a particularly nice ambassadorship solve this one? 

Catch of the Day

Please, bloggers who write about democracy and institutions, read this from Andrew Rudalevige:

Now, for the record, we do not actually have an executive-centered presidential system, or even a presidential system. At least, if we do, that’s not the Constitution’s fault. Congress is Article I, and for a reason: Congress is a hugely powerful legislative institution. It can act in almost all areas of governance, overruling the president — given sufficient unity. Indeed, Congress can get rid of the president — again, given sufficient unity.

I have plenty more to say about all of this, but I think I'm going to stop right there, other than referring you to the rest of the post, because this is really, really, important. The US system is one of separated institutions sharing powers. It is not a "presidential" system.

Great catch!

Elsewhere: Democracy, Republicans, Shutdown links

No links post this morning with the holiday, such as it is. I'm not sure what I'll be writing here today...I will be over at Greg's place and PP.

And new columns. At TAP, I argue for Madisonian democracy against the wave of hits its taken during the shutdown (and in particular, from Dylan Matthews).

Over at Salon over the weekend, I push back against predictions of long-term doom for the GOP. As I've said before, I do think that if Republicans win the presidency in the near future that there's a good chance they'll have difficulty governing, and they're obviously having difficulty governing as far as control of the House is concerned.

One more: back on Friday, I hit Republicans over the debt limit. Remember: it's not just that they're demanding a ransom for the debt limit, which would be pretty bad -- but we're now only days away, and they haven't yet decided on what ransom to ask for.

Meanwhile...here are some links to the ones that I've written about the shutdown/debt limit fight that I think hold up pretty well. Well, mostly pretty well. I thought Boehner was a smart enough politician that he would probably have avoided it (although see the last link). Otherwise, I think these are still useful:


Not another budget apocalypse: the basic structure of the confrontation.

Extortion for the sake of extortion: how I see the basic position of the radicals.

The Day After Shutdown: how things play out if a shutdown happens (and therefore, why Boehner should have avoided it).

My five biggest worries: about why a shutdown could happen even though Boehner should have been avoiding it.

Elsewhere: Spin, Lazy Republicans, more

My TAP column today is about why we get too much coverage of spin, and why we're stuck with it.

At Salon over the weekend, I talked about lazy Republicans and the party-aligned press that encourages them to stay that way.

And, hey -- I did some TV today. Well, not real TV; WaPo's version of it. It was supposed to be on the question of whether the shutdown was a sign that the US system was inferior, but it wound up being more about the shutdown in general...anyway, if you want to see a skype version of me, tune in.

Oh, one more: I argued over at PP on Friday that it's not Madison, it's the Republicans.

The Dangerous Toys Aren't the Problem

A rare disagreement with Seth Masket.

First, what we agree on: minority parties, mostly Republicans, are increasingly resorting to extraordinary measures, such as recall elections, filibusters, and, now, the government shutdown along with a threat of a debt limit breach. As opposed to either just waiting to contest the next election, or to normal attempts to influence outcomes by logrolling, bargaining, and more, realizing that they won't be able to win by doing those things but they would have the capacity to moderate their policy losses. All of that is definitely true.

Seth says that it's the effect of polarization: since the parties are so far apart, losing is an objectively bigger deal (the policy differences are larger). What's more, since far more things are party-line, losing happens more often to the out-party.

It's plausible, but I don't really think that's it, or at least it's only a relatively small portion of it.

What I think is going on is that the dysfunctional strand of the GOP -- what Norm Ornstein calls "radicals" today, as opposed to conservatives -- has, for a variety of reasons come to dominate the party. Basically, it's not that the Rockefeller wing is long gone; it's that the the legacy of McCarthy, Nixon, and Newt has overwhelmed the legacy of Taft, Reagan, and Dole within the conservative movement.* Essentially, what I'd say is that McCarthy, Nixon, and Newt all proved capable of crashing the system in one way or another, even with a lot less polarization and (in the first two cases) with weaker parties than we have now.

Seth says, cleverly, that if we know that there are people who are going to want to do this sort of thing, we should:

take away the dangerous toys. We don't have to have the filibuster, the recall, or a separate vote to raise the debt ceiling to pay for things Congress has already voted to pay for. None of these things were written into the US Constitution, no less the Bible. If we don't like the way they're being used, we can choose to abolish them.

I'm very skeptical of this solution. I have a lot more confidence in the capacity of various Newtlets to figure out how to construct new dangerous toys, MacGyver-like, out of whatever happens to be lying around.

Moreover, while I'd be perfectly happy to get rid of recalls and some other legacies of the Progressive era, as long as we have a system of separated institutions sharing powers, the Newtlets and Tail Gunner Teds are going to be able to exploit the basic structure of the government. Indeed, in the wake of the shutdown we've had a number of calls for getting rid of that basic structure (and I'm hoping to write a response soon; regular readers know I disagree). But in the real world we're pretty much stuck with it, for better or worse. I much better like the idea of figuring out incentives to fix the broken Republican Party than the idea of rearranging the system to limit the damage that some mulyaks can cause.





*I realize as I write this: I don't actually know as much as I should about Taft. I know about his failed campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination, but really not all that much about how he actually conducted himself in the Senate. Put it on the list of things I should learn more about...

Catch of the Day

Have to give one of these to Dan Drezner, for celebrating the craven self-interest displayed by politicians in the Syria matter:

Look, this isn't rocket science:  the opposition party will always be more skeptical of administration policy. Throw in a nation that's pretty sick of war and pretty hostile to taking action in Syria and this is a no-brainer position to adopt for most Republicans.  This is particularly true since I suspect enough Republicans will join with most Democrats to give the administration the necessary authorization.

Old foreign policy hands will likely cluck a bit and disparage the shifting ideologies of GOP members of Congress in the name of political self-interest.  To which I say:  hooray for political self-interest!!  It's not like the status quo in GOP foreign policy thinking had been serving them all that well over the past few years. This isn't to say that I agree with the GOP on this issue, but for once, the American political system appears to be working as intended. 

Key point -- and one of my favorites -- is that for politicians, trying to do the right thing is highly overrated, if doing the right thing means trying to understand the policy the way that a scholar might, and choosing the best option in that sense. If we wanted a system that put the experts in charge, we could easily do so. But part of the reason for a democracy (as I argued over at the Prospect last week) is a bet that it actually generates better policy outcomes than simply turning things over to the experts would yield. That happens (if it does) when politicians use their strengths: chiefly, their skill at sniffing out the political advantages and disadvantages of a position.

Anyway: nice catch!

Yes, Madisonian Democracy Protects Minorities

Matt Yglesias argues that the filibuster protects the status quo (true!) and that it doesn't protect minorities (false!):

Most people aren't Jehovah's Witnesses, and Jehovah's Witnesses are mildly annoying when they go door-to-door prosyletizing, so you might see a proposal to trample on Jehovah's Witnesses interests by banning them from knocking on doors. In this case, the filibuster would defend the interests of a minority group because it makes it harder to pass laws.

On the other hand, most people aren't gay and some straight people think gay sex is immoral, so gay people may be subject to discrimination in employment and other venues. You might see a proposal to advance gay interests by banning employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In that case, the filibuster harms the interests of a minority group because it makes it harder to pass laws.

Two things. One is that Yglesias places the whole debate in the context of minority groups. That's fine, but it's not the whole question; there's also minority opinion and interests. Indeed: the real issue here is probably majority and minority opinion, more than anything else.

And then...well, yes, it's not only true that Madisonian democracy has a status quo bias, but it's one of the chief drawbacks of the system. I absolutely concede that.

But his example here shows why we it can be more helpful to think about majority and minority opinion. Who is the minority in his example of discrimination against gay people? It's trickier than he thinks. If the group is just LGBT people, then they surely are a minority...but if they are a minority, then their efforts to affirmatively pass laws is going to be unsuccessful in a plain majoritarian legislature because they won't have a majority of the votes!

On the other hand, if the group in question is, say, all tolerant people who also believe in government intervention to protect against discrimination, and if that group is in the majority...well, then, it is absolutely true that the filibuster (and other Madisonian devices) might prevent them from passing laws. Absolutely true -- but not a case in which "the filibuster harms the interests of a minority group." Because in this case, the filibuster is harming a majority -- the people (assumed to be a majority) who want to pass the bill. The minority are (if the facts are as stipulated), whether Yglesias likes it or not, the people who hate the gays (and/or hate government intervention).

If, however, we want to only talk about minority groups, which is also reasonable, then we're in a bind. Because in that case lots of people, and almost certainly the plurality, don't care much either way, which means that both gay people and bigots who hate them are minorities! One or the other will be shafted. And, while one might protest that haters aren't really a "group," in fact we're probably talking here about members of certain churches (who think of their political action on this issue as a manifestation of their religious belief). We all agree, I would think, that church members are a group.

Now, it may be the case that one of these claims is more just than the other. But in my view, that's not a claim that democracy has much to do with. Democracy per se isn't (in my view) about making sure that justice prevails; it's about making sure that people can self-govern in some sort of meaningful way. Which is hard enough.

So to go back to "one or the other will be shafted," what Madisonian democracy attempts to do, in my view, is to make sure that the side that loses isn't destined to lose on everything forever or even for the medium term; that the losing side on one thing doesn't have to be on the losing side of everything; that intensity counts, so that an intense minority will (often?) defeat an indifferent majority; and otherwise ensuring that self-government does not become an oppressive rule of the majority. And it does all of that using a variety of devices and incentives to make sure, above all, that one stable majority does not confront one stable minority. For whatever the justice of that situation may or may not be, what Madison was certain of (and what keeps being proven out, from ancient times to Egypt this year) is that it just isn't stable.

If we're to return to the filibuster specifically, that's a much harder question. As I've written, I think the filibuster is most justified simply in terms of democracy when it comes to judicial nominations -- because that's exactly where other checks and balances are weakest. For legislation (and to some extent for executive branch nominations), what I like about (more limited than current) filibusters is that it strengthens individual Senators, which in my view strengthens overall self-government. But really we're not so much talking filibuster in particular here than we are talking about the general idea of majoritarian vs. Madisonian, or anti-majoritarian, democracy.

And for that, yup, Yglesias is correct that a status-quo bias is a very real problem for advocates of Madisonian systems. There's no inherent reason why status-quo bias is good for democracy...indeed, it absolutely goes against one of the major arguments for democracy -- the ability of people to collectively choose their own destiny. So I'll certainly acknowledge that drawback, and that the benefits I see much outweigh it -- which, in fact, I believe they do.

But he's absolutely wrong about majorities and minorities.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Genevieve Bujold, 71.

And a bit of good stuff:

1. Jonathan Chait on Glen Greenwald.

2. Mark Kirk's return to the Senate, from Matthew Cooper.

3. And Seth Masket on convenient anti-majoritarianism.

More Cranky Monday Blogging

OK, everyone is picking on Ross Douthat's column from yesterday. Why isn't anyone picking on Richard Haass?

Much of his piece yesterday, the part concerning foreign relations, seemed sensible to me. And I have no real problem with his point that, given the lack of major danger abroad, it's a good time to solve domestic problems. But then there's this:

At home, we must work to restore the foundations of American power. In many cases, this doesn’t even require spending more — often there is little relationship between our investments and the results.

The United States spends nearly twice as much as other industrialized nations per citizen on health care — often with worse outcomes. We spend more per student on education than most other wealthy countries, with few results to show for it. Attracting top-quality teachers, rewarding them for success, and enabling parents and students to choose effective schools would be a better use of resources.

And with only modest government funds we could foster public-private partnerships to rebuild this country’s often crumbling infrastructure, refashion immigration policy to give preference for visas and green cards to many more immigrants with advanced degrees and needed skills, and above all reduce long-term entitlement obligations, cutting the ratio of public debt to G.D.P.

In other words: I'm going to use my expertise on foreign affairs to tell everyone what they should be doing on domestic policy, and I'm going to pretend that my particular policy preferences are simply common sense that everyone obviously should support.

It's not true! As Jamelle Bouie said in a nice post last week: "Americans—both in and out of Washington—like to think that because we share a common national identity, we also share common interests. And in the broadest sense, we do. But for issues of public policy—on the questions that drive our politics—there’s far more disagreement than not." His point there was that this is perfectly healthy and natural, and he's exactly right.

Nor is it the case that the US has ignored education, health care, and other domestic issues out of some sort of misguided obsession with mythical threats from abroad. Simply not true!

There's just no hint here of two massively important factors: that people disagree over policy, and that policy -- even when everyone does agree -- is sometimes really, really, hard to get right.

It's enough to, yes, make me cranky.

Remember: In Democracies, Policy is Contested

I wrote: "The chief job of party leaders in the Senate is to look out for individual senators’ interests and protect their rights." Which led to a letter-to-the-editor denouncing me, or Senator, or someone; my sentence "perfectly captured what’s wrong with Congress."

The chief job of leaders in the Senate is to do the people’s business.  The minute people in an organization begin protecting their interests and rights instead of doing what the organization is supposed to do is the minute the organization becomes dysfunctional. Unfortunately, that describes most of the government today.

I pick on this mainly because I suspect this sentiment is extremely widespread. It is, however, wrong.

To the letter-writer, I would say: go back to Madison, and read Federalist 51. For Madison, the self-interest of politicians was a given. What's needed, he says, is a way to harness that self-interest for democratic purposes. 

Which is exactly what's happening here. Party leaders in the Senate look out for individual Senators' interests -- which means that they make it possible for Senators to work for their own states' interests. 

More broadly, the entire US political system (and, I think, every representative democracy) is based in very large part on the career ambitions of politicians, and thus on electoral incentives. What's unusual about the US system is that great efforts are made to restrain the maximum influence of any one politician or even set of politicians (federalism, separated institutions sharing powers); and, at the same time, individually empowered politicians are given very different constituencies, thus giving them incentives to see particular, localized interests as well as or even more than the "national" interest. 

Indeed, one of the big changes over the last fifty years or so has been the rise of the national political parties, which has balanced out to some extent the constitutionally-mandated bias towards localism and particularism. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is certainly a question for reasonable disagreement, but that it's happened is, in my view at least, clear historic fact. 

If one believes that "the people's business" is self-evident, and that the majority will agree, then it's natural to conclude that something must be wrong with democracy when those self-evident policies are not being followed. The problem with exhorting politicians to just "do the people's business" is that what constitutes "the people's business" is contested.  And what to do when large groups disagree about what is self-evident, or at least what is best, is the whole point of democratic design -- and a difficult problem indeed to solve. 

Which is not to say that the Framer's solution, as adapted and modified over the years, is the only solution, or even necessarily the best one. But one doesn't get far in designing a democracy without understanding that basic problem.

Attention Civics Teachers

I mentioned that we had local election in Texas this past weekend...here's one result I missed that may be of interest. One of the small-town school boards around here had a one-vote election. No, not a one-vote margin...well, that too. A one vote election.

It happened in the Lytle school district, in Lytle, Texas. It's a small town to begin with, population about 2400, although the school district must be bigger -- there are apparently 1700 students involved. Local elections normally include city council and tax measures as well as school board, but none of the council elections were contested, so they were canceled, and no tax measures were needed this time. So it was just the school board, with only two contested districts out of seven total. And in one of those, only one person bothered to vote.

The candidates? The rules say they don't need to live in their districts, and as it happens neither winner Christina Mercado or loser Patty Cortez did live there.

There wasn't a recount -- would have been fun! -- but there was some suspense in the form of one provisional ballot, which turned out to have been cast by someone outside of the district, and thus not allowed.

I suppose if you want to look at this from a elections policy angle, I'd probably question why these local elections can't be on the same day as the general election. On the other hand, since there's no account of either candidate actually campaigning, it's not as if a larger general election day electorate would have been making a more informed decision on what is (I'm pretty sure) a nonpartisan election.

But anyone who wants to tell stories about why one vote might make a difference: clip and save this one from Lytle.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to David Krumholtz, 35.

And a little good stuff:

1. John Huber studied electoral systems and ethnic politicization: "[I]n fact PR is associated with lower levels of politicization.   This finding has important implications for constitutional design in divided societies and provides fact-based evidence supporting advocates for PR."

2. Dan Drezner on Richwine.

3. W.W. on Richwine.

4. And Emily Bazelon on the Obama War on Leaks.