Anybody involved in politics is used to the challenge each election cycle of convincing people–perhaps casual voters, perhaps embittered cynics, perhaps just the un-enthused–that the election in question really matters. This has become a more urgent problem now that the Conventional Wisdom–not without some justification–is holding that partisan and ideological “gridlock” is keeping anyone from really governing.
But when you sit down to look at the consequences of various scenarios coming out of this next election in 2016, it quickly becomes clear that Republican extremism on issues that don’t require big congressional majorities for action is turning it into a high-stakes election for real. I ran through some of these consequences at TPMCafe this week:

[I]t’s extremely unlikely that 2016 will produce the kind of temporary governing capacity for either party that Democrats won in 2008, with a big majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (for a year, at least, until the disaster of Scott Brown’s special election victory in January 2010). But a rapidly escalating series of Republican post-election promises that do not require a landslide are making this a “high-stakes election” nonetheless.
Most notably, Republican proto-presidential candidates are tripping over each other to promise to revoke Obama’s executive orders and regulations. This threatens to become a counterrevolutionary executive agenda that goes beyond high-profile items like immunity for prosecution for immigration violations and utility carbon emissions regulations and extend deep into everything Democrats were able to accomplish since 2009. It’s just a matter of time until a competition breaks out that culminates with demands and promises to repeal everything Obama ordered, including regulations needed to implement everything Congress passed since 2009. That’s obviously a pretty big deal.
A second major “high stakes” area involves the president’s power to use military force. In 2012 Republicans accused Barack Obama of weak leadership and predicted threats to American interests ranging from Palestine to Iraq to Russia to North Korea, with a particular emphasis on Iran. This time around Republicans both in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are describing these threats as imminent, and advocating what amounts to a re-invasion of Iraq to deal with Islamic State and an ultimatum to Iran to abandon its entire nuclear program immediately or face U.S. or Israeli airstrikes. That’s aside from the equally radical but less immediately dire course of action the GOP is advocating with respect to Israeli-Palestinian relations (an abandonment of any two-state solution), and its treatment of the current Israeli government (which as of last night appeared likely to continue in power for the next four years) as the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy.
More generally, what looked as recently as a couple of years ago like a burgeoning intra-GOP debate over “non-interventionism” as a corollary of limited government conservatism has collapsed, and even Rand Paul is joining his party colleagues in trying to sabotage a nuclear deal with Iran at the risk of war, and rejecting any obligation to fulfill diplomatic commitments made by Obama. The fork in the road in November of 2016 appears as stark for foreign policy as it does for executive action on domestic policy.
A third “high stakes” area is legislative, and involves the strong possibility that Republicans will, if they control the White House and both chambers of Congress, use the budget reconciliation process to kill or at least disable the Affordable Care Act, cut taxes, boost defense spending, and radically “reform” entitlements–all in one bill that requires only majority votes in each House. There were reportedly plans in the works to do all that back in 2012, in a blitzkrieg action planned for early in 2013, had Mitt Romney won and Republicans reclaimed the Senate that year.
You could take any of these three areas of “high stakes” and invert the language to see how Republicans tend to view the coming election: If Democrats keep the White House, and particularly if they reclaim the Senate (a real possibility), Obama’s agenda of executive action on immigration and climate change will be solidified and extended; his weak and reckless foreign policy will “embolden” IS, Hamas, Russia, and various domestic terrorists; and the economic recovery will drown as high taxes, debt worries, red tape and class warfare discourage growth and innovation.
And both parties undoubtedly agree a deeply divided Supreme Court is an appointment or two away from a decisive conservative or liberal majority as challenges to Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps even (if the wind blows strongly Democratic) Citizens United, all come to potential fruition. It’s likely that by 2017, legal challenges to net neutrality and electronic surveillance will also be making their way towards the Court.

If that’s not enough to make you want to vote and convince others to vote, I guess you are waiting for Armageddon.

Remembering the events in Selma a half-century ago this last weekend got me thinking about the claims we hear so often about today’s conservative folk having to live under “government oppression.” The parallels are not very forgiving, as I noted at TPMCafe this week:

One of the regular features of our contemporary political life is conservative complaints about being victims of “government oppression.” You know what I mean: having to pay taxes to help “losers” is an outrage. Having to buy health insurance is tyranny. Not being allowed to discriminate against gay people is a denial of religious liberty. Letting employees enrolled in government-subsidized health care plans choose types of contraceptives you don’t approve of is complicity in murder. Not being able to expect the IRS to rubber-stamp your application for tax-exempt status for your political group so you can hide your donors is living under fascism, making one fear jackboots kicking down doors in the night. No wonder the most terrifying fear harbored by many of these folk is that Big Government will take away the guns they keep under their pillows!
The 50th anniversary of the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, should have served as a graphic reminder of what real “government oppression” looks like: police dogs; fire hoses; truncheons; deputized thugs. An entire state mobilized to deny the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly, in the broader aim of denying the right to vote. And all this orchestrated by conservative politicians supposedly devoted to an ideology of decentralized government power and individual rights.
Indeed, there are unsettling parallels in the rhetoric of the racist thugs of 1965 and that of today’s brave resisters of Big Government, as the president noted on Saturday:

[A]t the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called Communists, half-breeds, outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse – everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism was challenged.

And the cause of equality was slandered again and again–as “government oppression.” Here’s how George Wallace greeted the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

Never before in the history of this nation have so many human and property rights been destroyed by a single enactment of the Congress. It is an act of tyranny. It is the assassin’s knife stuck in the back of liberty.
With this assassin’s knife and a blackjack in the hand of the Federal force-cult, the left-wing liberals will try to force us back into bondage. Bondage to a tyranny more brutal than that imposed by the British monarchy which claimed power to rule over the lives of our forefathers under sanction of the Divine Right of kings….
It threatens our freedom of speech, of assembly, or association, and makes the exercise of these Freedoms a federal crime under certain conditions.
It affects our political rights, our right to trial by jury, our right to the full use and enjoyment of our private property, the freedom from search and seizure of our private property and possessions, the freedom from harassment by Federal police and, in short, all the rights of individuals inherent in a society of free men…

Yes, George Wallace was a constitutional conservative before his time. I don’t personally remember that speech, but I do remember watching in awe in early 1965 as Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox, weeping actual tears, blubbered, “My government’s taken my business away” as he closed his Atlanta restaurant rather than serve African-Americans. Less than two years later Maddox was governor of Georgia–another symbol of defiance to “government oppression.”

It’s pretty clear in retrospect–and in the present, when you look at phenomena like the policing tactics used in Ferguson, Missouri, and many other places–who’s the oppressor, and who’s the oppressed.

Theda Skocpol of Harvard and Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota have published the best analysis yet available of what will and won’t likely happen if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down certain Obamacare subsidies in the case of King v. Burwell. I wrote about it earlier today at the Washington Monthly:

Skocpol and Jacobs note that the major national policy changes–most notably bans on discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, and limitations on price discrimination against the old and the sick–would stay in place. And in states that either already have or could be expected to quickly adopt their own exchanges, life would go on as before:

Overall, from half to three-fifths of Americans reside in states where subsidies probably or certainly would not be discontinued. These states almost all have effectively functioning marketplaces where growing numbers of insurers are offering competitively priced plans and making solid profits.

The rest of the states are for the most part governed by conservative Republicans, and aside from the immediate distress of people losing subsidies and probably insurance altogether, Obamacare waivers that adapted exchanges for use by the entire Medicaid population would be endangered. Worst of all, the ensuing debate will focus on the real linchpin of GOP resistance to Obamacare, which is equitable treatment of old and sick people. But as Skocpol and Jacobs note, that is precisely the most popular element of the Affordable Care Act.

So far, Republicans have been able to denounce “ObamaCare” without discussing popular specifics. But that strategy will collapse if the Supreme Court threatens profits and benefits already in place – and a new Republican Party strategy may prove hard to devise amid splits between ultra-conservatives eager to destroy the health reform law and pragmatists seeking to modify and live with it.

Yep, that about sums it up. Conservatives may be publicly asking SCOTUS to toss a spear into the Great White Whale of Obamacare. But privately they may be praying for a reprieve from waves of discontent that might capsize their entire ship.

The other wrinkle worth mentioning is the idea floated by Justice Alito during oral arguments over King v. Burwell that the Court might strike down the subsidies but build in a delay in the effective date to let Congress and/or the states get their acts together. But as Skocpol and Jacobs show, the dilemmas the situation creates for Republicans aren’t going to be cured by time.

As the MSM and Republicans crank up the scandal machine to hype up and pre-judge the Hillary Clinton email “scandal,” the former are finding plenty of Democrats who seem to be upset (if not “panicking”) as well. But all is not as it seems, as I pointed out today at Washington Monthly.

Sorry, but I’m going to have to call BS on Politico‘s big story from Gabriel Debenedetti last night suggesting that Democrats are in a state of near-panic over the HRC “email crisis.” The piece is festooned with quote after quote–some attributed, some blind–from early-state Dems, mostly in Iowa, arguing that Hillary’s “problem” means that other candidates should get into the race–you know, just in case. Indeed, that’s the thrust of the quote that supplies the alarming “she could implode totally” headline:

[W]hile the overall message of trust in the presumptive frontrunner is clear, the saga is also exposing deep party-wide anxieties about having so much invested in a single candidate, more than 20 months before November 2016.
“It adds more reason to get other people involved in this process, to make sure we have other strong, good candidates running,” said Larry Hogden, chairman of Iowa’s Cedar County Democrats. “Because, who knows? She could implode totally.”

You’d think after maybe the third or fourth statement from an Iowan to that effect, it might occur to Debenedetti to wonder why they keep bringing this back to the need for a bigger Democratic presidential field. Could it be that Iowans (and for that matter, activists from New Hampshire and South Carolina) want a bigger field for reasons other than anxiety about HRC? Because maybe a competitive field gives them the attention, and yes, money, that they absolutely live for in the early states? Should it perhaps be noted that Iowa Democrats were talking exactly the same way long before anybody knew a thing about HRC’s email practices?

Look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting a competitive Democratic nominating process this cycle, whether it’s because particular Dems think (a) it’s fun and lucrative; (b) it’s necessary to “keep Hillary honest,” or (c) HRC’s the wrong nominee altogether. But Democrats who feel any of these ways need to come clean about them, and not add credibility to a “narrative” that at first blush feels like a continuation of the Clinton Scandal Industry of the 1990s.

As part of a debate touched off by Matt Yglesias at Vox, who expressed doubts about the sustainability of the U.S. political system given the frustrations and Constitution-stretching associated with partisan gridlock, I wrote a column at TPMCafe suggesting a much more realistic problem: that gridlock is already creating a craving for big, consequential elections producing transformative governing agendas, which in turn undermines the willingness to do anything about day-to-day gridlock. I also alluded to a piece by Jonathan Chait at New York arguing that gridlock would likely be undermined by demographic changes that made Republicans less reliant on government-hating southern white voters.

My most immediate concern, because we can already see it happening, is that partisan/ideological gridlock will feed on itself. As routine policy accomplishments achieved piecemeal via the normal legislative process fade, people in both parties will increasingly focus on taking full advantage of rare governing opportunities produced by exceptional electoral victories to shoot for the moon. After all, as Democrats discovered in 2010, House majorities and Senate supermajorities can be lost instantly. So a maximalist approach when in power–as ideologues of the left and the right invariably call for–could become routine, encouraging the “losing” party at such junctures to obstruct as much of the governing party’s agenda as possible and to pursue their own shoot-the-moon strategies in the future.
Call it the Big Bang Theory of Polarization. The only limitation on its operation, of course, is that winning the big electoral victories necessary to pull off an ideological Big Bang could require the kind of flexibility that thwarts ideologues. That is indeed Chait’s hope. But it ignores the possibility of a two-track partisan strategy based squarely on deception.
In 2012, for example, Republicans were planning a post-election agenda based on implementing the audacious Paul Ryan budget and the repeal of Obamacare in one budget reconciliation bill–even as Mitt Romney was on the campaign trail posing as the soul of moderation. Something very similar actually happened in 2001, when the “humble” and “pragmatic” George W. Bush, that supposed paragon of bipartisanship in Texas, took office after a disputed presidential campaign and immediately pursued a tax package that shaped all domestic politics for at least a decade.
And after 9/11, of course, Bush also launched one or two (depending on how you reckon Afghanistan) “wars of choice”–because he could. Perhaps Chait is right that the demographic foundation for this kind of Rovian politics of saying one thing on the campaign trail and then doing five things in office is eroding. But don’t forget the power of Republicans at the state level to continuously shore up that foundation by making it harder for young people and minorities to vote. And it’s also worth remembering that governance-enabling landslides are as often the product of external circumstances and coincidences–you know, the much-discussed fundamentals–as of moderate appeals to swing voters that are implemented by bipartisan governance.

I don’t think Democrats are as addicted to the idea of a great gettin-up morning that will enable them to implement all their dreams; indeed, there’s a lot of sentiment that aside from the Affordable Care Act, Democrats did not get a lot out of their 2008 landslide (short-circuited to a considerable extent by Scott Brown’s Senate victory early in 2010). But assuming gridlock continues, and Obama shows the limits of what can be achieved by executive actions, the craving for a landslide may spread through both parties.