New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt wrote a piece yesterday that every Democratic activist and elected official should read and then try to put into as plain a form of English as possible. Its title is plain enough: “Why Budget Cuts Don’t Bring Prosperity.” And its content wouldn’t have seemed that striking until very recently, when one of America’s two major political parties suddenly embraced the belief that government spending had somehow caused a private-sector housing and financial crisis and then a demand-side recession, and that radical cuts in government spending would put the economy on the right track via “business confidence” or some such magical term.
The simplest term for this delusion is probably Hooverism, since many Americans are aware, however dimly, that the Great Depression was significantly worsened by the policies of a president who was ideologically opposed to any major stimulation of the economy by the public sector. Now it’s true that many of today’s conservative activists deplore Hoover’s handling of the Depression, but only because they believe he was too active in trying to use government to revive consumer demand and prevent the collapse of public and private investment–or according to one recent conservative account, he was too “pro-labor” in his wage policies!
Here’s Leonhardt’s take, which is what virtually every politician in either party would have odded at until quite recently:

[N]o matter how morally satisfying austerity may be, it’s the wrong answer. Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will.

Leonhardt makes the crucial point that interest-rate signals simply aren’t supporting the common conservative argument that the public sector is gobbling up resources for pointless programs and redistribution that the private sectors needs to produce jobs:

In the early 1990s…government borrowing was pushing up interest rates. When the deficit began to fall, interest rates did too. Projects that had not previously been profitable for companies suddenly began to make sense. The resulting economic boom brought in more tax revenue and further reduced the deficit.
But this virtuous cycle can’t happen today. Interest rates are already very low. They’re low because the financial crisis and recession caused a huge drop in the private sector’s demand for loans. Even with all the government spending to fight the recession, overall demand for loans has remained historically low, the data shows.

The impact of budget cuts on the current economy seems to be lost on
Republicans who are constantly predicting gloom and doom over entitlement spending projections that extend for the next several decades. And again, the credit markets are showing no signs at this point of panicking over long-term deficits and debt, much less short-term deficits and debt. Indeed, the U.S. economy is actually doing better than those of countries who have adopted austerity policies. As Leonhardt observes:

For the sake of the economy, the best compromise in coming weeks would be one that trades short-term spending for medium- and long-term cuts. Beef up the cost-control measures in the health care overhaul and add new ones, like malpractice reform. Cut more wasteful military programs, like the F-35 jet engine. Force more social programs to prove they work — and cut their funding in future years if they don’t.
By all means, though, don’t follow the path of the Germans and the British just because it feels morally satisfying.

So here we are, with Republicans threatening to shut down the federal government and create a debt-limit crisis unless Democrats agree to deep short-term spending cuts, exactly what the economy does not need. This is a manufactured crisis that Democrats need to expose early and often, and if impugning Herbert Hoover’s memory helps get the job done, so be it.

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin makes a pretty interesting point today about one potential implication of Sen. John Thune’s decision not to run for president in 2012: This could be the first presidential election since 1904 without a sitting member of Congress in the mix.
He goes on to discuss various reasons for this development, including Tea Party antipathy towards Washington, and the advent of a younger conservative leadership cadre that’s not quite ready for the presidential campaign trail.
But he doesn’t mention another explanation that makes at least as much sense and applies to candidates who have never served in Congress: it’s a lot easier to run for president (unless you are the incumbent) these days if you don’t hold a full-time elected office.
After all, the presidential field in 2012 will likely include two candidates who have never held an office other than in Washington, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. And it could include a number of candidates who have ended or are nearing the end of service as governors (former governors Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin; Haley Barbour, who leaves office in Mississippi at the end of this year; and possibly Mitch Daniels, who leaves office at the end of 2012). What all these folk have in common is the time to get to know the fine citizens of early caucus and primary states. National conservative stars like Chris Christie, who is only in the second year of a first term as governor, or Marco Rubio, in his first year as a senator, have day job responsibilities that can’t really be shirked at this point in their careers. And at least one potential candidate, Mike Huckabee, may pass up a second presidential run because he has no way of supporting himself if he leaves his highly-paid gig at Fox News.
Having said all this, it’s possible that Rep. Michele Bachmann will wind up spoiling Martin’s scenario by running for president (in that case she would be bucking a historical trend even older than that of sitting congressmen running, in seeking to become the first House member since 1880 to get elected). And it’s worth remembering that five sitting U.S. senators (four of them Democrats) made the race in 2008.
Still, one suspects the wave of the future in preparing for presidential runs is probably represented best by someone like Newt Gingrich, who parleyed national fame gained in Washington to put together an impressive network of organizations and publishing outlets that paid the bills and gave the would-be president all sorts of excuses to go on television and press the flesh in places like Dubuque, Manchester and Charleston. And then, of course, there’s Sarah Palin, who may have set a precedent by leaving her elected “day job” without even completing a term, blaming the resignation on her enemies, and then “going rogue” as a national celebrity with no responsibilities more serious than those of, say, a Kardashian.

Even as a vast number of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates continue to defy the usual rules of the cycle calendar by refusing to move towards formal declarations of candidacy, at least we are getting some definition of the field by the occasional statement of definitive non-candidacy. First, last month, was Mike Pence, who decided he’d rather run for governor of Indiana. And then yesterday came the announcement by South Dakota Sen. John Thune, whose prospective candidacy appeared to be based on his non-offensiveness to any major conservative faction, his looks, and his proximity to Iowa.
Thune was also one of those possible candidates whose support seemed to be centered among Republican insiders and gabbers disenchanted with better-known figures like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich. Tim Pawlenty or Sarah Palin. Said insiders and gabbers will now likely shift their affections to the remaining Dark Horse Saviors like Haley Barbour (who spent yesterday in Des Moines), Mitch Daniels or (though he has repeatedly said he won’t run) Chris Christie. Hope springs eternal in the mover-and-shaker breast.

As Washington prepares for an ever-more-probable government shutdown over failure to reach agreement on a continuing resolution for current-year appropriations, Ezra Klein offers a useful observation about what a shutdown would mean, and why it could happen despite pious talk (from Democrats, anyway) about compromise:

Republicans and Democrats, it seems, govern rather differently. Republicans are proving themselves willing to do what liberals long wanted the Obama administration to do: Play hardball. Refuse compromise. Risk severe consequences that they’ll attempt to blame on their opponent. The Obama administration’s answer to this was always that it was important to be seen as the reasonable actor in the drama, to occupy some space known as the middle, and to avoid, so much as possible, the appearance of dramatic overreach. This is as close as we’re likely to come to a test of that theory. In two separate cases, Republicans have chosen a hardline position and are refusing significant compromise, even at the risk of terrible consequences. Will the public turn on them for overreach? Rally behind their strength and conviction? Or not really care one way or the other, at least by the time the next election rolls around?

It may very well be, of course, that the GOP’s commitment to a hard-line position makes the Democratic position somewhat irrelevant; Democratic offers to compromise–or for that matter, a countervailing Democratic hard line–won’t move them, or necessarily influence public opinion, either. But how the two parties extricate themselves from a shutdown–short of abject surrender–could be pretty important.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Many Beltway insiders seem to have convinced themselves that abortion doesn’t matter anymore. Just look at the press clippings from CPAC, where Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wowed his D.C. cheerleaders with a speech doubling down on his earlier call for a “truce” over culture-war issues like abortion. Chris Christie came into town a few days later, and excited a lot of the same people with a speech focused almost exclusively on the idea that entitlement-spending cuts are the nation’s top priority. Big-time conservative strategists like Michael Barone have opined that a truce over abortion policy–as reflected in a structure of legalized abortion with “reasonable” state restrictions–is already in place. And we are told incessantly that the driving force in Republican politics, the Tea Party movement, is basically libertarian in its orientation and wildly uninterested in cultural issues.
How out of touch could they be? It’s rare to see the Washington zeitgeist so disconnected from the reality of what conservative activists and their representatives are doing and saying on the ground in Iowa, in state capitals across the country, and next door in the House of Representatives. Far from being a sideshow, the Right-to-Life movement’s priorities have been front-and-center for conservatives across the country.
Take the incoming “Tea Party Congress”: This January, House Republicans made restricting abortions an immediate goal, pushing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 3) as a top priority right after their vote on Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law (H.R. 2). The abortion legislation, which has 209 co-sponsors (199 of them Republicans), is advertised as simply codifying the Hyde Amendment that’s been attached to appropriations bills since 1977; but it would actually go much further, denying employers a tax exemption for private health policies that include coverage of abortion services. Originally, H.R. 3 also sought to redefine “rape”–for purposes of the longstanding “rape and incest” exception to the Hyde Amendment–to include only “forcible” acts, presumably to remove pregnancies resulting from acts of statutory rape from the exception. The House also appears poised to pass appropriations measures that would eliminate funds for the Title X program, which provides contraceptive services for low-income women, and ban any federal funding for Planned Parenthood. And it is working to keep participants in the Affordable Care Act’s health-insurance exchanges from purchasing policies that cover abortions, even with their own money. If there’s a “truce” in place, it’s being violated daily.
At the state level, newly empowered Republicans are also promoting anti-abortion measures. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has designated a bill to require pre-abortion sonograms an “emergency” measure, giving it legislative priority. In South Carolina, a bill is moving toward passage that would create an unusually broad “conscience clause” to protect health care workers and pharmacists from disciplinary actions prompted by a refusal to administer birth control or emergency contraception, to take part in medical research that destroys an in vitro human embryo, or to halt care of a dying person in a hospital. In Ohio, Republican legislators are pushing a blizzard of anti-abortion bills, including one that would fine doctors for performing abortions when a fetal heartbeat is discerned. A South Dakota legislator just made national headlines by introducing a bill that would classify as “justifiable homicide” a death caused with the aim of protecting the unborn. He withdrew it after critics called it a license to kill abortion providers, but a separate bill in the same state, headed for a floor vote, would require women to attend a lecture at a crisis pregnancy center (code for an anti-abortion advocacy office) before getting an abortion. Even Mr. Focus-on-the-Fiscal-Crisis, Chris Christie, opted to eliminate state contraceptive services in the interest of “fiscal restraint,” and made the cuts stick with a gubernatorial veto. One could go on and on; there’s clearly no “truce” in the state legislatures.
And there will be no truce on the presidential campaign trail. Daniels’s statements about dialing down the culture wars have already been vocally rejected by potential presidential rivals Mike Huckabee, John Thune, and Rick Santorum. Rush Limbaugh has said that Daniels’s position reflects the interests of a Republican “ruling class” that wants to rein in social conservatives and the Tea Party movement. In his CPAC speech, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour framed his anti-abortion record as a core element of his conservative credentials, and repudiated his own past remarks urging support for pro-choice Republicans. Mitt Romney, whose previous support for abortion rights is a major problem for him politically, isn’t about to soft-pedal the issue. It’s likely that either Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, two the Right-to-Life movement’s very favorite pols, will be running for president later this year. In fact, in the vast field of Republicans considering a presidential campaign, there’s not a single figure who is publicly identified as pro-choice; even Donald Trump has gone out of his way to reassure the anti-abortion crowd he’s now on their side.
Why are Republicans are still fixated on abortion, at a time when they seem to be slowly drifting toward tolerance, or at least relative indifference, on other culture-war issues such as LGBT rights? For one thing, public opinion on abortion seems frozen in amber: Notably, in sharp contrast with issues like gay marriage, there’s no evidence of generational change. But the main reason for the GOP’s focus on restricting and ultimately outlawing abortion is simply that the Right-to-Life movement has worked very hard for many years to make itself perhaps the most impossible-to-ignore, dangerous-to-diss faction in Republican politics, particularly at the presidential level. Its strength was most recently illustrated when it stopped John McCain from choosing Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as his 2008 running mate, and had its poster pol, Sarah Palin, placed on the ticket instead. That’s power.
By failing to note these dynamics, Washington types have been ignoring what is right in front of their eyes. Whether it’s the economic crisis–which has raised the relative volume of debate over fiscal issues–or the alluring media focus on seemingly “libertarian” legislators like Rand and Ron Paul (both of whom, by the way, are anti-choice), or the ever-present longing for a mature, bipartisan consensus, the punditocracy has convinced itself that Tea Party Republicans aren’t interested in going to war over abortion. As I’ve written before, in fact they’d love to. Why are we acting so surprised?
UPDATE: The House approved Mike Pence’s amendment to ban federal funding for Planned Parenthood by a 240-185 vote, with eleven Democrats voting for the amendment and seven Republicans voting against it. This was pretty predictable; the most significant thing that happened during the floor debate was a remarkably brave speech by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) about an abortion she had undertaken during a troubled pregnancy, in response to the usual GOP slurs against women as casual baby-killers. (I’ll be writing a separate post about the important strategic implications of Speier’s speech for pro-choice progressives).
The whole GOP sponsored continuing resolution, which included both the Planned Parenthood ban and the destruction of Title X family planning appropriations, passed the House over the weekend. I’m pleased to report not one House Democrat supported it. It will be interesting to see how the abortion-contraception issues play out in the ultimate House-Senate-White House negotiations over the CR, which may include a government shutdown.

To hear Republicans tell the tale, destroying public employee collective bargaining rights–as is currently being attempted in Wisconsin and Ohio–is essential in addressing the current state budget crisis in most parts of the country.
Aside from the fact that many Republican governors and legislators are manufacturing or exacerbating budget crises by pushing for tax cuts or corporate welfare (notably in Wisconsin and in Florida), it’s not at all clear there’s any correlation between public employee collective bargaining rights and budget problems.
As it happens, (these numbers are from American Rights At Work) thirteen states have no collective bargaining rights for public employees, and others limit them to selected public employees. Are these states in fine fiscal shape? Not entirely. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20% (Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina). Another, South Carolina, comes in at a sizable 17.4%. Nevada, where state employees have no collective bargaining rights (but local employees do) has the largest percentage shortfall in the country, at 45.2%. All in all, eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio.
An agenda of busting public employee unions does not appear to be any sort of budgetary silver bullet, and instead, should just be understood as representing the ancient conservative hostility to unions and workers’ rights generally, with fiscal problems, real or manufactured, just serving as a fresh excuse to grind this particular ideological ax and wage class warfare.

In the post just below, TDS Co-Editor William Galston alludes to reports of “serious bipartisan talks underway in the Senate to follow up on recommendations of the president’s fiscal commission.” This has indeed been a source of major buzz over the last few days, particularly when the Wall Street Journal‘s Jonathan Weismann broke the story and erroneously reported a revenue target for the group that indicated Democrats weren’t getting any significant tax increases in exchange for cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits (always the implicit tradeoff at the heart of hopes for a bipartian deficit deal).
Seems there is always a “gang” that emerges in the Senate to explore bipartisan deals, and this one naturally involves the four senators who sat on the deficit commission and actually supported its report: Democrats Dick Durban and Kent Conrad, and Republicans Tom Coburn and Mike Crapo. They’ve apparently brought Democrat Mark Warner and Republican Saxbe Chambliss into their cabal, creating a credible-sounding “Gang of Six.” Ezra Klein provides a chart of what the commission recommended, which has a much higher revenue figure than the original “Gang” reports, and which also assumed the Bush tax cuts for high earners would be allowed to expire.
It’s anybody’s guess whether Durban, Conrad and Warner can actually get a significant number of Senate Democrats to support what looks like a complex automatic mechanism for producing domestic spending cuts (including Social Security and Medicare), and whether the GOPers in the Gang can actually get Republicans to back off on the Bush tax cuts and contemplate “tax reforms” that raise total net revenues. It’s also unclear whether the White House and House Republicans, who are engaged currently in a game of chicken over FY 2011 appropriations, are in any way bought into this process.
But as a point of historical fact, as Jonathan Bernstein has pointed out, past Big Deficit Deals were only executed when financial markets very explicitly demanded it, which isn’t happening right now:

The last two major deficit reduction packages — the bipartisan one during the George H.W. Bush administration, and the partisan one passed by the Democrats in 1993 — were both driven by that kind of “explicit outside pressure.” There’s simply no reason to believe that Republicans would agree to significant increased revenues under current circumstances, and no reason to believe that Democrats would slash spending enough to make a serious dent in medium-term deficits without a Republican buy-in on taxes.

Since the House Republicans who are hankering for a government shutdown over appropriations are also extremely unlikely to support even a nickel of new revenues, the Gang is definitely fighting an uphill battle, even if it reaches internal agreement in its Capitol hideout.

A political commentariat that’s finally getting nervous about the slow-to-develop 2012 presidential field has been operating on the assumption that the real show begins on February 6, 2012, the current date for the Iowa Caucuses. That’s where the two parties’ calendars, which only allow four states to hold nominating events prior to March, have placed the starting gun.
But states have to take action to implement the party schedules, and at present, the big fly in the ointment is once again Florida, which under state law is scheduled to hold its primary on January 29, 2012. Unfortunately for those who want an orderly process, Florida legislative leaders, and now superstar U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, are opposing a change in the date.
Much of the talk about Florida’s primary date revolves around the question of whether the national GOP will penalize the state by denying it delegates if it breaks the calendar rules (this was the dilemma that faced Democrats in 2008). But just as important is the almost certain triggering of action by Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to guarantee their primacy by moving up their own contests into January, as happened four years ago.
Josh Putnam, an expert on this whole topic, is currently projecting that Iowa will hold its caucuses either on January 16 or January 9, with New Hampshire’s primary occurring on January 17 or 24, and Nevada and South Carolina holding their events on January 28. That could all obviously change, but any Republican wanting to run for president would be smart to assume their campaign needs to be in very high gear by Thanksgiving Day of this year.

Whatever the relative degree of success or failure conservatives have had in convincing Americans that deep spending cuts are necessary to reduce debts and deficit at the federal level, I don’t think there’s much doubt they’ve done pretty well in blaming public employee benefits and pensions for budget problems at the state level. But it’s important to understand that what Gov. Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin right now goes a lot further than any effort to trim benefits and pensions. Here’s Slate‘s Dave Weigel, who is not unsympathetic to conservative spending reduction efforts:

This goes much, much further than reckoning with the size of public employee pensions. This is clearly designed, as Taft-Hartley was clearly designed, to make it impossible for labor to retain its strength. And this is happening in most states now; the table’s set for cuts to public sector union benefits, so it’s not altogether difficult for Republicans to go a little further, while they have the chance. (It’s tough to imagine Wisconsin retaining its lopsided GOP majorities after 2012.) The difference between what states can get away with now and what the Democrats could get away with in 2009-2010 — when they were always a few votes short of passing [card] check — is dramatic, but it’s not new.

It’s also pretty clear that pols like Scott Walker (and Christ Christie, and Rick Scott, and others) see themselves as enjoying the same political benefits from busting public employee unions as Calvin Coolidge, the obscure Massachusetts governor who broke a police strike and was quickly elevated to the vice presidency and then the presidency. As in so many areas of public policy and politics, today’s conservatives are taking us down a long memory lane deep into the last century and beyond.

Do you think Democrats are divided over the necessity or advisability of thinking about “entitlement reform?” Maybe, but that’s in part because Democrats have somewhat different ideas about how to maintain a robust and progressive social safety net.
Among Republicans, there’s little or no substantive disagreement about the desire to transform Social Security and Medicare into something radically different. But when it comes to politics–well, just check out two prominent GOP voices on this subject that were raised this very day.
Today New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came to Washington and made a well-received speech at the American Enterprise Institute thundering against the cowards in Congress and demanding an immediate Republican assault on Social Security and Medicare as a simple measurement of “spine.” There’s no speech text available just yet, but believe me, Christie sounds a lot like Howard Dean circa late 2003 challenging the guts of his party colleagues on Iraq.
And yet here is Rich Lowry of National Review, by any conventional measure a much more conservative figure than Christie, making a very different calculation:

The public opposes cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and most Republicans did nothing to signal on the campaign trail that they’d do anything to touch them — in fact, most of them ran against Obama’s Medicare cuts. Changing popular programs without an explicit mandate to do so is a perilous business. It may be that the public is in a Chris Christie “give it to us straight” mood, and House Republican work on the entitlement front will dovetail with the bipartisan effort developing in the Senate, forcing President Obama to make good on his oft-expressed interest in reform and making real progress possible. It also may be that the House Republicans will repeat the experience of their forebears in 1995-96, who didn’t run on Medicare cuts, made them a centerpiece of their budget-balancing anyway, and got killed, setting back the limited-government cause for more than a decade.

As Jonathan Chait notes, Lowry goes on to endorse an assault on Medicaid–not a program of enormous interest to the old-white-folk base of the GOP, except for those who can’t afford nursing home care–and perhaps some cautious probing on Medicare. But in a context where pols like Christie (and others) are loudly trying to shame Republicans into expressing the courage of their actual convictions on Social Security and Medicare, such tactics may ring hollow both within and beyond the conservative movement.