You probably knew that Speaker John Boehner faces a tricky math problem in assembling a House coalition of Democrats and reasonable Republicans in passing a bill that would avert a fiscal crisis. For a peek at how difficult is this challlenge for the incoming congress, check out Nate Silver’s FiveThirty Eight.com post, “In House of Representatives, an Arithmetic Problem,” which explains:

… The new House of Representatives will have 233 Republicans and 200 Democrats. Two seats remain vacant, which means that 217 of 433 votes will be required to pass a bill. Of the 233 Republicans, 51 will be members of the Tea Party Caucus, give or take a few depending on which first-term members of Congress join the coalition. The other 182 are what I will call Establishment Republicans….It seems clear that Mr. Boehner lacks the confidence of roughly three dozen Republican members of the House, and possibly more.
Say that Mr. Boehner cannot count on the support of 34 of his Republicans when it comes to passing major fiscal policy legislation. That means he would need to identify 18 Democrats who would vote along with the Republicans who remained with him.
Here’s the problem: it might be hard to round up those 18 Democrats…The reason is that most of the Democrats who remain in the House are quite liberal.
…What that means is that if Mr. Boehner has a significant number of Republican defections, as he did on Thursday night, he will need to win the support of at least some liberal Democrats. And a bill that wins the support of some liberal Democrats will be an even harder sell to Mr. Boehner’s Republicans. For each vote that he picks up from the left, he could risk losing another from his right flank.

Given Boehner’s ‘Plan B’ fiasco, argues Silver, “this arithmetic problem could turn out to be intractable at some point.”
None of which should engender much sympathy for Boehner, whose militant lack of bipartisanship thus far has been a huge part of the problem all along. Silver doesn’t discuss the option alluded to by TNR’s Noam Sheiber and J.P. Green, of a coalition of House Dems joined by a small handful of Republicans, perhaps with good reason, since it is a long shot. If any coalition is forged which prevents going off the cliff, it will more likely be in spite of Boehner’s ‘leadership,’ rather than because of it.

It seems like just a few months ago a lot of pundits marveled at congressional Republicans’ lockstep unity and discipline in obstructing almost every legislative proposal introduced by Democrats, in stark contrast to earlier eras when Republicans would usually compromise for the good of the country. Republican still have the power to obstruct progressive legislation. But there are signs that GOP unity is beginning to unravel.
As Ronald Brownstein puts it in his National Journal post, “A Role Reversal: Dems Grow More Unified While Cracks Form in the GOP“:

The endgame over the fiscal cliff, like the first stirrings of debate about gun control and immigration, all capture a subtle but potentially consequential shift in the Washington dynamic.
On each front, Democrats are growing more unified while Republicans and conservatives are displaying increasing cracks. That inverts the alignment through most of President Obama’s first term–and indeed most of the past quarter-century.
In the decades immediately before and after World War II, both parties were divided in Congress between the moderate and the more ideological wings. But since the 1980s, the two sides have diverged. Conservatives have established unquestioned dominance in the GOP. Meanwhile, Democrats, though moving to the left overall, have maintained much greater divisions.
The debates over taxes, guns and immigration all reflect this evolution. Not long ago, each issue divided both parties.

Brownstein provides several instructive examples of political divisions within the two parties and temporary bipartisan agreements that emerged in congress during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. Brownstein then describes the beginnings of the transformation:

But while Democrats have remained divided on all three issues, Republicans more recently have moved right almost monolithically. On taxes, every congressional Republican voted against the Clinton 1993 budget plan and Obama’s health reform proposal that raised taxes, and virtually all Republicans backed the younger Bush’s tax cuts. Almost every House Republican from even the leafiest suburban districts voted with the National Rifle Association in 2011 to override state concealed-carry laws. And support for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants grew so toxic inside the GOP that John McCain, during his 2008 presidential campaign, felt compelled to renounce his own 2006 legislation providing one. On all of these issues, Democrats remained split through the Bush years and Obama’s first term.
Now this unity gap is narrowing. On taxes, Republicans and conservatives are agonizing over whether to accept an increase not only in tax revenue but also in marginal tax rates–a party anathema since the 1990 deal. By contrast, Democrats are adamantly behind raising rates on the top earners. (If anything, Obama is courting resistance by setting the bar too high with this week’s offer to preserve current rates for those earning less than $400,000.) On immigration, Obama and congressional Democrats have signaled that they intend to move forward aggressively; the same trajectory seems to be developing, in a more qualified way, on guns. On both issues, most Republicans will still oppose the Democratic initiatives. But unaccustomed cracks have emerged in that wall of opposition.
Shifting electoral incentives on each side are driving this role reversal. Overall, Democrats still operate as more of a coalition party, harboring a broader range of views, than Republicans. That’s largely because self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals in the electorate, which means that Democrats in most races (including the presidency) need to attract more votes from moderates to win than Republicans do.

Brownstein adds that “Democrats are now operating with a far more ideologically cohesive coalition that overwhelmingly supports action on issues that previously paralyzed the party.” He predicts “more polarization” in the short run, but sees Democrats as gaining more leverage to force reasonable compromises.
If Brownstein is right, then President Obama’s negotiation strategy makes sense. Offering concessions that many of his supporters oppose shows that he is at least negotiating in good faith, while Boehner is stuck with an increasingly unreasonable party that shows no interest in anything resembling a fair compromise.Whatever Obama gives up in the short run can be restored later, since demographics and souring public attitudes towards Republican obstructionism should help Democrats regain control of the House over the next two elections.

Before closing our textbooks for the semester, please answer the following question:

Consider the following description of a political formation:

1. The political formation does not have majority support on a national level and cannot control the entire country but has impregnable strongholds in certain rural, less populated areas and specific geographic regions of the country.
2. Within these secure redoubts the leaders of the political formation are more directly threatened by hyper-extreme elements championing even more intense hardline policies than their own than they are threatened by challenges issued by any less extreme elements.
3. The political formation does not conceptualize “politics” as governance but as warfare. It has a warrior ethic that accepts the inevitability of continual battles that may extend over decades or generations.
4. The political formation is unresponsive to normal “carrots and sticks” as they are perceived in traditional western political life nor do they engage in what traditional political science calculus would consider rational cost-benefit analysis.

For 10 credit points, class, is this political formation:

a. The U.S. Republican Party
b. The Afghan Taliban
c. All of the above

Whatever else can be said about Speaker John Boehner, he appears to be a man who loves his country. Indeed it’s hard to think of a politician who gets more emotional about the topic, as a Youtube scan will quickly verify.
Yet, now that the Speaker’s ‘Plan B’ has been nuked by his fellow Republicans, Boehner stands at a crossroads of decision: love of country vs. love of power. The choice he makes will likely define his character in public memory. If he makes the wrong choice, and chooses career over country, he could damage America’s economy dramatically. If he makes the right choice, country before career, he will provide another ‘profile in courage’ for future generations of elected officials.
Noam Scheiber outlines Boehner’s dilemma in his New Republic post “Plan B Dies, Prepare to Go Over the Cliff“:

…Once the House GOP deserted John Boehner last night, there were basically two options for striking a deal before January 1. Either Boehner passes a cliff-averting deal with a majority of House Republicans, or he passes one with a few dozen Republicans and a majority of House Democrats. Alas, I see neither of these things happening this year.

I’m going to hold on to the admittedly long-shot hope that Boehner will consider going with Scheiber’s second option. There is nothing in Boehner’s history that provides reason for this hope — you don’t get to be Speaker without a ruthless careerist mentality. He will almost certainly lose the speakership if he makes the courageous choice. But he might lose it even if he doesn’t, so unhinged are many of his Republican House colleagues, who are demanding an even more obstructionist position in the fiscal cliff negotiations.
Here’s how Scheiber explains the political implications of Boehner making the courageous choice:

That leaves option two: Boehner passes a bill with a rump group of Republicans and a majority of House Democrats. There are actually two ways this could happen. First, Boehner could essentially accept the offer on the table from Obama, perhaps with a tiny symbolic concession that lets him claim he squeezed more out of the president. Or Boehner could take up the bill the Senate has already passed, which extends the Bush tax cuts for families making under $250,000 per year and lets them expire above that.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely hard to imagine Boehner embracing either of these measures and putting them to a vote, for the simple reason that passing either one over the opposition of his caucus would leave him incredibly vulnerable only days before he stands for re-election as Speaker. (That happens on January 3.) If Boehner wants to keep his job, this just isn’t something he’ll screw with. And for whatever reason–certainly not the quality of life it affords him–Boehner comes across as a man who wants to keep his job.

It’s also questionable that Boehner could get the needed “few dozen Republicans” Scheiber noted above. I won’t be surprised if Scheiber’s conclusion that Boehner will opt for the ‘Thelma and Louise’ pans out.
Yet, when all the strategic choices are a pretty big gamble, there is something to be said for going with the one that challenges with a bit of courage, vision and bipartisan spirit. Sure, it’s a tall order for a guy who hasn’t shown much of it thus far. But Boehner may realize that, on another level, his choice is between taking a chance on a genuinely bipartisan resolution of the crisis or continuing to be a herder of rigid ideologues who will never enact any legislation that benefits the American people.
I won’t be surprised if this possibility is dashed before the sun sets. But America is in urgent need of hope and healing. President Obama has done as much as he can. Now somebody else has to accept the challenge.

Writing in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ in the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira reveals the clarity of the public’s opinions about the issues being negotiated in the “fiscal showdown.” As Teixeira explains, “As an extensive, just-released Pew Research Center poll makes clear, the key priorities for the public can be summed up as:”

Raise tax rates on those who can afford it.
Don’t raise the Medicare or Social Security eligibility ages.
Don’t cut spending in critical areas such as education, transportation, and aid to the poor.

And the data couldn’t be more clear, as Teixeira continues:

In the Pew poll, an overwhelming majority (69 percent to 28 percent) said we should raise the income tax rate on those making $250,000 or more to help close the deficit. The public also endorsed raising the tax rate on investment income by 52 percent to 43 percent.
The same poll showed the public opposed raising the Medicare eligibility age (56 percent to 41 percent) or the Social Security eligibility age (56 percent to 42 percent).
Finally, the public massively opposed reducing federal funding for education to reduce the deficit by a margin of 77 percent to 21 percent. They also opposed reducing federal funding for roads and transportation (67 percent to 30 percent) and opposed reducing federal funding for low-income assistance programs (58 percent to 38 percent)

In light of the dramatic disconnect between congress and the citizens they represent thus far, adds Teixeira, “The solution to the fiscal showdown is not yet clear. But the public’s priorities on that solution are. Let’s hope policymakers are paying attention.”

President Obama and Democrats should be encouraged by a new CNN/ORC International poll, which underscores how little leverage the Republicans have at this political moment. Here are a couple of the results, which spell trouble ahead for the GOP:
Asked “Do you have more confidence in President Obama or in the Republicans in Congress to deal with the major issues facing the country today?,” 49 percent said President Obama, compared to just 31 percent for ‘Republicans in congress.’
Responding to the question, “If the two parties can develop bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems, which party do you think should give up more of the proposals it supports — the Democratic party or the Republican party?,” 53 percent said the Republican party, compared to 41 percent for Democrats. And 53 percent also said that the Republican Party was “too extreme,” with 43 percent saying the GOP was “generally mainstream.”
In addition 52 percent said they disapproved of “the way John Boehner is handling his job as Speaker of the House?,” with only 34 percent expressing approval. The speaker and his fellow Republicans haven’t yet shown much regard for how the public feels about their extremist politics. But the tide of public resentment seems to be rising, and their obstructionist strategy may not be able to survive much longer.

Jamelle Bouie’s post, “Why the next four years might be more of the same” at Greg Sargent’s ‘Plumline’ sketches a fairly discouraging scenario for the remainder of President Obama’s term. As Bouie explains:

…None of the incentives have changed for Republicans, meaning they still have no reason to cooperate with the President. In other words: The next four years may be largely the same as the last four.
The GOP’s current behavior is out of sync with the public’s priorities, as expressed in the election, where solid majorities reelected President Obama and sent more Democrats to the Senate. But that likely won’t matter to Republicans, because the odds are good that in the end they won’t incur public discontent for failing to cooperate. As the latest ABC News/Washington Post survey shows, there’s a strong disconnect between how Americans view the president, and how they view the question of whether he has a mandate to carry out his agenda.

And despite President Obama’s otherwise impressive poll numbers, “56 percent say Obama does not have “a mandate to carry out the agenda he presented during the presidential campaign,” but rather should “compromise on things the Republicans strongly oppose” in the latest WaPo/ABC News survey, reports Bouie.
Bouie faults the public’s lazy assumption that “If both sides support something, it’s probably good. But if one side vocally opposes a measure, there must be something suspect — either the policy is bad, or the other side is not trying to meet the concerns of the offended party.” Further,

Congressional Republicans use this dynamic to great effect during Obama’s first term, and successfully portrayed his administration as hopelessly partisan. But this also has important implications for the next year of policy making. Republicans still want to weaken Obama’s presidency, and so the basic dynamic of his first term is still in effect. Take, for instance, immigration reform. If Obama tackles immigration reform from the left — or even the center — he will receive significant Republican pushback, if only because presidents polarize disputes they step into. And the mere fact of that pushback may sour the public on his package, even if they’re sensible reforms.

If Bouie is right, however, this will likely firm up the Latino vote for Democrats. And there may be a limit to how much more Republican obstruction the public can stomach, before it becomes obvious that GOP unwillingness to compromise is the real problem. But it seems likely that Bouie is correct that the Republicans will test the outer limits of public tolerance.

At Reuters, Patricia Zengerle and Susan Cornwell report that “After shooting, some Republicans more open to gun controls,” but note that “…Any legislation would likely wait until 2013, after negotiations on how to address the “fiscal cliff” of spending cuts and tax hikes due to kick in at the beginning of the year.”
Better late than never, I suppose, even though he won’t be in the Senate next session. Could this be groundwork for a run for Kerry’s seat?
In a saner world this one sentence from Jonathan Wesiman’s New York Times report on the House Democrats press conference urging Speaker Boehner to take up restrictions on high capacity ammo clips and assault weapons would win enough Republican votes for passage: “Representative Ron Barber, Democrat of Arizona, who was shot by the gunman who gravely injured his predecessor, Gabrielle Giffords, recalled living through the 45 seconds it took for the gunman who shot him to fire 30 rounds, taking down 19 and killing 6.”
At The New Republic Adam Winkler has an informative mini-history of gun control in the U.S. from FDR forward.
In FL, Rick Scott seems to be making a bid for the nation’s most unpopular Governor. As Ashley Killough reports at CNN Politics “…Rick Scott’s ratings with voters are just plain awful. The numbers cannot be sugar-coated,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “When voters in a politician’s own party want him to be challenged in a primary by another candidate, it’s difficult to see it as anything but outright rejection.”
States where Obama improved on his ’08 numbers, according to Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley at the Crystal Ball: “There were five states where Obama actually improved upon his 2008 performance. Among the 26 states he won, Obama saw his vote share go up by a bit more than 1 percentage point in New Jersey and by a negligible 0.05 points in Maryland. The other three states where Obama’s portion of the vote grew were Louisiana (+0.65), Mississippi (+0.79) and Alaska (+2.92), where the absence of Sarah Palin probably led to the slight Democratic addition.”
At The Boston Review, Jake Blumgart has “The Next Left: An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara,” young editor of The Jacobin, a new American socialist magazine. “Today, its Web site gets around 250,000 unique views a month. Sunkara decided the project would get boring if left entirely online and so financed a print magazine from a handful of subscriptions and $2,000 from his own pocket. Today the magazine has more than 2,000 subscribers, including influential activists, labor leaders, and some of the very mainstream media figures it occasionally targets. (Full disclosure: I periodically contribute to Jacobin.) The press is paying attention.”
Also at TNR, Timothy Noah asks — and pretty much answers — a worrisome question “Are Democrats Reverting to Wimps?”
Digby puts it well in her post, “The Dem leadership steps right on the third rail,” which concludes, “Remember, Social Security doesn’t contribute to these deficit numbers. The Democratic leadership is just doing it to appease a bunch of cold hearted conservatives. And if they succeed the supporters of those cold-hearted conservatives are going to blame it all on the Democrats. Brilliant.”
David Callahan reports at Demos Policy Shop on what is really driving the deficit: “Going after Social Security instead of more fully rolling back the Bush tax cuts and more deeply cuttting defense is like grabbing the wrong suspect while letting the real offenders walk free…In any case, now is not the time for deficit reduction at all, given the still fragile economy. Congress should turn to this challenge once unemployment falls — say, to under 6.5 percent. But if there is going to be deficit reduction, it should logically focus on tackling the near-term drivers of the deficit, not messing with Social Security..”

NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the political world’s most eloquent champions of meaningful gun control, said something interesting — and important — on Meet the Press last Sunday:

This myth that the NRA can destroy political careers is just not true…The NRA’s power is vastly overrated.

No doubt Bloomberg is correct with respect to urban congressional districts. But not everyone would agree that it applies as a blanket generalization across the nation. What hasn’t changed, according to Nicholas Confessore, Michael Cooper and Michael Luo, writing in the New York Times, is the NRA’s formidable assets: “A $300 million budget, millions of members around the country and virtually unmatched ferocity in advancing its political and legislative interests.” As The NYT article points out, quoted by Tracy, “Over the years the NRA has perfected its strategy for responding to mass shootings: Lie low at first, then slow-roll any legislative push for a response.”
But that was before the Sandy Hook shootings. In the past the NRA has been able to shrug off massacres, and the politicians have been able to get away with making statements backed by no action, as the incidents faded to the back pages of newspapers. At The New Republic, Marc Tracy quotes veteran Republican strategist Todd Harris: “The public is not interested in hearing reasons right now for why assault weapons shouldn’t be banned. They may be receptive to those arguments in a month or two, as they have been in the past.”
But the massacre of 20 young children in an elementary school is so brutal and horrifying that members of congress who now vote against modest and reasonable reforms in firearms policy are going to have to answer to a growing chorus of middle class parents who are now paying close attention.
Some no-brainer reforms that should be ripe for enactment would include a ban on public sale of high-capacity ammo clips, assault weapons and armor-piercing cop-killer bullets, along with a stronger national data base to identify criminals and people with a history of violent behavior at point-of-sale. The NRA will try to stall and delay action, hoping public attention will evaporate, so political moderates can run for cover. But it may be too late for that tactic to work this time, especially if the parents of the slain children of Newtown organize themselves into a political force that can’t be ignored. The NRA’s ‘slippery slope’ arguments against these reforms are not likely to get much traction in the current political climate.
As Mayor Bloomberg says, quoted by Amanda Sakuma at msnbc.com, the president must take “immediate action” and show leadership on the issue. “If he does nothing during his second term, something like 48,000 Americans will be killed with illegal guns,” Bloomberg said of Obama. “That is roughly the number of Americans killed in the whole Vietnam War.”
if Mayor Bloomberg is right that the NRA is losing influence in America’s electoral politics, it would be welcome development for public safety in America. And by getting out in front on the issue as a compelling spokesman for a sane firearms policy at the right time, while other candidates dither, Bloomberg may be strengthening his cred as a potent force in national politics.

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum flags Reid Wilson’s National Journal article, “The GOP’s Electoral College Scheme,” which warns Democrats of a coming battle:

Republicans alarmed at the apparent challenges they face in winning the White House are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states, an initiative that would significantly ease the party’s path to the Oval Office.
Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party’s majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.

Drum adds that “If, say, Michigan switched to a proportional system, then Mitt Romney wouldn’t have won zero of its 16 electoral votes this year. He would have won eight or nine. Voila! More votes for Mitt.” Further, says Drum,

Do this in other states that are either solidly Democratic or trending Democratic, and you could snag 40 or 50 extra electoral votes for the Republican nominee. Needless to say, there are no plans to do something similar in states that tend to vote for the Republican candidate. Texas and Georgia have no intention of going proportional and allowing the Democratic nominee to get a share of their electoral votes.

In his post, “Electoral College Shakeup: How Republicans could put a lock on the presidency” at In These Times, Rob Richie explains:

If Republicans in 2011 had abused their monopoly control of state government in several key swing states and passed new laws for allocating electoral votes, the exact same votes cast in the exact same way in the 2012 election would have converted Barack Obama’s advantage of nearly five million popular votes and 126 electoral votes into a resounding Electoral College defeat.
The power of elector-allocation rule changes goes further. Taken to an extreme, these Republican-run states have the ability to lock Democrats out of a chance of victory in 2016 absent the Democratic nominee winning a national landslide of some 12 million votes. In short, the Republicans could win the 2016 election by state law changes made in 2013.

Richie notes that the scheme is already in motion in Pennsylvania and “In the last year, Republican leaders have indicated interest in dividing electoral votes in such states as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and, just this week, Virginia, where state senator Bill Carrico has introduced a bill to allocate Virginia’s electoral votes by congressional district.” He crunches the numbers and provides an interesting chart showing two scenarios using the ‘allocation by district’ method under which Romney would have won an electoral college majority. He demonstrates that under existing political realities, there is no possibility of Democrats using the technique to their advantage.
Jamelle Bouie’s post on the topic, “Republicans Float Plan to Make Electoral College More Unfair” at The American Prospect adds “Republicans…want to “reform” the system by adopting the worst of all worlds–winner-take-all for Republican states, proportional distribution for Democratic ones…it amounts to little more than a scheme to rig presidential elections in favor of GOP candidates.”
As Richie concludes,

…The very fact that such a scenario is even legally possible should give us all pause. Election of the president should be a fair process in which all American voters have equal ability to hold their president accountable. It’s time for the nation to embrace one-person, one-vote elections and the “fair fight” represented by a national popular vote. Let’s forever dismiss the potential of such electoral hooliganism and finally do what the overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently preferred: Make every vote equal with a national popular vote for president.

This may indeed be the most viable strategy for Democrats, since some Republicans will likely join the direct popular vote movement, concluding that direct popular vote gives them a better shot than trying to ‘run the table’ in winning district allocation of electoral votes reforms in all the swing states. Democrats on, the other hand, will continue to have a growing edge caused by demographic trends. It’s the only way to insure a fair playing field for all parties.