Jonathan Chait of The New Republic is right on the mark in a post mocking the standard congressional Democratic response to the impending “symbolic” vote on repealing last years health reform legislation. The heart of the Democratic talking points appears to be the complaint that this vote is a “waste of time” that distracts attention from the economy.
It should be obvious that this line of attack represents an implicit concession that critics were right last year when they said Democrats should shelve health reform (and for that matter, climate change legislation and DADT repeal) until the economy revives–i.e., that the federal government cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Since it’s probably going to be a good while before we are back to the levels of unemployment we had in, say, the late 1990s, if they ever return, the party of activist government should probably be wary of such arguments.
Moreover, as Chait points out, the “waste of time” claim may be displacing a much stronger set of arguments focused on the rather important fact that many components of health reform are popular:

Republicans are voting to open up the donut hole for Medicare recipients and charge them higher rates, allow insurance companies to turn away anybody whose family has a preexisting condition, and all sorts of awful things.
There’s a reason Republicans robotically insisted during the health care debate that they wanted to “start over” when their real position was to do nothing. It’s because doing nothing was wildly unpopular. Now they’re voting for the wildly unpopular do nothing plan, stripping away the pretense of having an alternative. Why not make them pay? Disingenuous whining about how we should be focused on jobs is not the way to do that.

Couldn’t agree more. Prospects for resisting the current wave of Republican policies depend very much on exposing their actual nature and consequences. This is one time and subject on which Democrats should welcome as substantive a debate as is possible.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of the most productive lame-duck congressional session in years–the crux of which was a grand bargain between Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama, who until recently seemed as if they could cooperate on absolutely nothing–devotees of bipartisanship have renewed their flagging hopes. These seem to include the president himself, who commented: “If there’s any lesson to draw from these past few weeks, it’s that we’re not doomed to endlessgridlock.” But au contraire: There is every indication that the next two years will be incredibly unproductive–a toxic mix of budgetary stalemate and bloody skirmishes, in Congress and in the courts, over every conceivable policy issue. For all the punditocracy’s denunciations of mindless partisanship, this state of affairs has largely been caused by disagreements over principle, rather than gamesmanship or hunger for power.
The truth is that, due to the ideological sorting-out of the parties over the past several decades–and in particular the hyper-radicalization of the GOP since 2006–our political system is in the throes of a battle over fundamentals. Democrats and Republicans are engaged in the most intractable face-off over core philosophical questions that Washington has seen in a very long time. Let’s take a look at four issues that used to command some degree of consensus, but which now make consensus impossible:
Economic recovery. With George W. Bush out of power, conservatives have rejected the very idea that government spending can stimulate the economy–despite it being a fundamental lesson from Economics 101. Going into the New Year, they are championing huge cutbacks in federal and state spending that are sure to immediately boost unemployment and dampen middle-class purchasing power; and a year from now, expect another brouhaha over the extension of unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, playing off the hard-money fanaticism of the Tea Parties, conservatives are planning to attack Ben Bernanke’s stewardship of the Fed–accusing him of undermining the soundness of the dollar and courting hyperinflation.
Progressive taxation. While liberals and conservatives have always differed over the extent to which the burden of paying for government should fall on those most able to pay–and on whether those taxes should be levied from capital or labor–the basic concept of progressive taxation has long been a sacred cow. That’s no longer true. In addition to demanding lower and lower marginal income and capital gains tax rates on the highest earners, conservatives are now publicly complaining that the working poor are not taxed enough, and calling for total exemptions from taxation of both investment and inheritance income. This trend is particularly acute at the level of state government, where Republicans in deficit-ridden states are calling for hikes in consumption taxes while fighting for the elimination of corporate and personal income taxes. In Congress, the Obama-McConnell tax deal has papered over these differences of principle, and there is little room for further cooperation until the question is re-fought with a vengeance in 2012.
Constitutional limitations on the role of government. Conservative legal thinkers have long deplored the judicial consensus on regulation that has generally prevailed since the 1930s–under which the Supreme Court adopted a view of the Constitution’s Commerce and Spending clauses that enabled federal involvement in a wide range of issues from banking to the environment. But until recently, the primary prescription that Republican politicians have offered for this problem was a slow counter-revolution via the appointment of conservative judges. Now, with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are calling for direct action. Their gambits range from requiring that federal legislation identify specific enumerated powers which enable it, to impeding the implementation of “unconstitutional” legislation through bureaucratic guerilla warfare, to adopting such hardy nineteenth and twentieth-century theories as nullification and interposition. Underlying this behavior is the philosophical focus on “constitutionalism”–the belief that the Founders (if not the Creator) envisioned permanent, substantive limitations on the federal government in defense of private property, the states, and cultural traditions, which cannot be modified by court decisions or even by constitutional amendments. For the next two years, we’re more likely to see slash-and-burn warfare on these issues than bipartisan comity.
American exceptionalism. Even foreign policy has become deeply ideological during the past few years, as illustrated by the controversy over whether President Obama is enough of a believer in “American exceptionalism.” The term once referred primarily to the belief that the United States had a special destiny, enabled by its natural and historical advantages, that made it a democratic role-model for nations the world over. Now it has increasingly come to mean the conviction that any legal or ideological limitations on America’s freedom of action–even limitations originally proposed by the United States itself–are deeply offensive to the country’s very purpose. This focus on exceptionalism is particularly useful to a Republican Party that is divided between isolationists, such as Ron Paul, and aggressive interventionists, such as Bill Kristol; both can agree that treaties and international organizations are a threat to America, whether it’s conceived as a fortress or as a global redeemer. With all of the GOP’s 2012 candidates banging the exceptionalist drum–and the relatively modest New START treaty already ratified–conservatives will likely spend the next two years trying to draw foreign policy contrasts between their party and the White House, rather than attempting to cooperate.
To be sure, many pundits–and even the White House itself–seem to think that there is room for agreement on reducing the long-term budget deficit. And in theory, the parties are not as far apart philosophically on this issue as on the four questions above; both conservatives and liberals acknowledge the harm of accumulating long-term debt. But, while conservatives are positively disposed toward entitlement cuts, any deficit deal will be a fantasy if it does not include tax increases–and those are anathema to conservatives. The alternative is a budget that cuts entitlements so far that rank-and-file Democrats will never agree to it. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm of a few libertarians for defense-spending cuts should not be mistaken as a general Republican position–witness the GOP’s enthusiasm for massively expanded missile defense systems and its general support for Obama’s continued engagement in Afghanistan. The upshot is that serious deficit reduction is not going to happen anytime soon.
Perhaps Obama will be able to eke out a few legislative victories–on funding for the war in Afghanistan, for example–that will produce a modicum of bipartisan comity. But ultimately, that will be an insubstantial veneer, as both sides seek to appear as if they are occupying the political “center,” accusing the other of negotiating in bad faith while protecting their own philosophical commitments. And in that respect, pols may be representing public opinion more than you might think, as recently explained by polling expert Mark Blumenthal, who has found that when most partisans (particularly Republicans) say they are for “bipartisan compromise” they mean the other party should give in. It’s not great news, but it is the truth.

We are in an era when really stupid ideas for stimulating economic growth by corporate giveaways are guaranteed to proliferate in state capitals around the country. Such schemes invariably overrate the extent to which any one state can chart its own economic destiny; overrate the importance of marginal costs to investors; overrate the importance of new, out-of-state investors as compared to home-grown business expansions; and vastly underrate the ability of executives to harvest incentives for doing what they wanted to do anyway.
Corporate welfare as an economic development “strategy” is traditionally beloved of Republicans (especially in the South), but is attractive to Democratic pols as well, especially those desparate to show tangible efforts to create jobs, however crummy or emphemeral. But of all the dubious giveaway-based “economic development initiatives” abroad in the land, few are as egregious as the recent fad of throwing taxpayer dollars at Hollywood to attract on-location film productions.
Via Matt Yglesias, we have a new analysis of film subsidies by the ever-invaluable Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (one of the few Washington-based progressive organizations paying close attention to policy trends in the states). Written by Robert Tannenwald, the CBPP report is a good primer on the false promises created by state film subsidies, which typically are excessive in size, under-audited, poorly targeted for the ostensible goal of creating real, sustainable jobs, and above all, designed to play on the excitement associated with big stars coming to town. Tannenwald doesn’t mention the corruption often associated with film subsidy programs (most notably in Louisiana and Iowa), but does emphasize one point rarely understood: the practice in some states of offering film production companies refundable or transferable tax credits that amount to cash grants, or literally paying corporations to offset big chunks of their costs.
These programs have clearly gotten out of hand as states compete for film business; as Tannenwald calculates, they cost about $1.5 billion nationally in the current fiscal year, even as states have reduced basic investments and laid off teachers and other public employees. The report doesn’t get into evaluating “really bad” or “not so bad” programs, though it’s possible to defend some (e.g., New Mexico’s) as focused on building an in-state infrastructure of film-related professionals and facilities that can become sustainable in the future. All in all, though, it’s a very strange way to spend scarce state dollars in the current, disastrous, fiscal environment, and should become a ripe target for budget-cutters who aren’t blinded by the klieg lights.

I vaguely remember seeing a movie years ago about the Spanish Civil War in which a general for the Republic was depicted as not-so-secretly expressing sympathy for the Franco insurgency. He impatiently responded to the salutes of his troops with the pro forma words: “Yes, Yes, of course, long live the revolution.”
That sort of totemic utterance is becoming common among conservatives who wish to warn their brethren of over-confidence or ideological excesses. To gain a hearing, they have to establish their right-wing bona fides with a recitation of one of the Tea Party’s favorite slurs of Obama and the Godless Democrats.
This was evident yesterday in a column by the once-great Michael Barone, who wanted to express his belief that Barack Obama would be a very formidable candidate for re-election in 2012. After reciting a series of facts and historical comparisons, Barone felt constrained to throw in this ritual incantation:

Working against Obama still will be substantive issues. Most Americans want to repeal Obamacare; he wants to keep it. Most voters rejected his vast expansion of the size and scope of government; he still thinks it’s a good idea.
Obama came to office with the assumption that economic distress would increase support for his policies to (in his words to Joe the Plumber) “spread the wealth around.” But the 2010 midterms make it about as clear as these things can be that voters reject such efforts.

Now the idea that Obama has proposed or executed a “vast expansion of the size and scope of government” is not a fact, or even a theory; it is simply agitprop. Similarly, the very tired recitation of Joe the Plumber’s mischaracterization of an Obama campaign trail comment, as though it represented a proud and much-repeated item of the Obama credo, is complete BS. But presumably Barone felt such pandering to the fantasies of the Right would make his sound advice go down easier.
On another front, Southern Political Report and Insider Advantage honcho Matt Towery did a piece suggesting that his fellow conservatives should be less inclined to call each other RINOs for such heresies as supporting the START treaty (as did Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson). But Towery thought it necessary to preface these thoughts with his own statement of right-wing solidarity:

Here’s both my qualifier and my bona fides for the opinion that
follows: I earned my Republican stripes working for a GOP U.S. senator, for
Ronald Reagan’s first successful presidential campaign and for Newt
Gingrich.

By the end of the column, Towery was defensively boasting of his support for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, and railing against Obama’s threats to the free enterprise system and fundamental liberties. And he’s a guy who sorta needs a relatively objective image for the benefit of his public opinion firm’s credibility.
Now I obviously don’t know what’s in the minds of Barone and Towery (and many others) who seem to feel they must offer some sort of party salute or denunciation of opponents in order to express a potentially unwelcome opinion. Maybe the gestures are so empty that they are virtually unconcious. But they sure are conspicuous to those of us who haven’t been inducted into the Conservative Brotherhood, or learned the secret handshake.

The lame-duck session of the 111th Congress, which was widely expected to be an unproductive nightmare, ended pretty impressively for the administration and congressional Democrats with a 71-26 Senate vote to ratify the START treaty. Here’s Politico’s summary of the end-game:

The Senate voted on START the same day Obama signed legislation that begins a process to repeal the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on openly gay service members, and hours after it passed a stripped-down defense authorization bill. On Tuesday, Congress sent the president a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food-regulatory system.
The 111th Congress adjourned for the year Wednesday night, but not before tackling a bill providing health care benefits for ground zero workers.

Some progressives, of course, remain angry about the tax deal that made the late-session activity possible, and we’re now about to enter a new Congress in which an emboldened and ideologically deranged Republican Party has a great deal more power to thwart the administration’s will. But all in all, given the baleful political developments since the enactment of health reform legislation, the very end of this Congress wasn’t so bitter, and even gave some reason for holiday cheer.

Anyone who’s been watching the self-inflicted damage that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s undergoing over his sunny comments about his home town’s experience with desegregation has probably felt a sense of deja vu. You might be remembering fellow Mississippian Trent Lott and his fall from the GOP Senate leadership in 2002 after he jovially suggested that life would be better if Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had won the 1948 presidential election.
A lot of the same ingredients are there. Like Lott, Barbour said something objectively outrageous about the segregationist heritage of their common state with a breezy insouciance that belied either deep denial or aggressive mendacity. Like Lott, Barbour (or his handlers) first reacted with wounded innocence and counter-attacks, but quickly retreated to the attempted damage control of a partial apology.
Will Barbout, who doesn’t occupy a national post similar in its vulnerability to Lott’s boss-man role in the Senate, brazen it out?
That’s hard to say, but this is one white southerner of Barbour’s own generation who doesn’t think he should get away with protestations of hazy memories or pretend that nasty old civil rights era was irrelevant to his own career.
The politics of Mississippi in the 1960s was all about race. And the growth of the Mississippi GOP, in which Barbour was a precocious leader making his bones in the early 1970s, was all about the party’s positioning as the inheritor of the Dixiecrat tradition.
Consider this series of numbers: 24%, 87%, 13%, 78%. These are the percentages received by the Republican presidential nominees in Mississippi between 1960 and 1972 (Richard Nixon in three of the four). Why the wildly gyrating support levels? The GOP was he unquestioned White Man’s Party in 1964 and 1972, and wasn’t in 1960 and 1968. This lesson was not lost on young GOPers like Barbour, who labored to make sure the anti-civil-rights bona fides of their party was not questioned thereafter (Barbour’s championship of Ronald Reagan in the contested 1976 nominating process was undoubtedly motivated by the very accurate fear that a moderate nominee like Gerald Ford would be vulnerable to a portion of the old seggie vote drifting to native southernor Jimmy Carter).
Now some of Barbour’s defenders are deploying the old line that criticism of him represents a plenary condemnation of southerners or of southern Republicans. But that’s a non sequitur. In a number of southern states, particularly those with an ancient Appalachian Republican voting base, the Republican Party as a viable political entity predated the en masse defection of segregationists in 1964. To put it another way, being a southern Republican in 1966 or 1970 did not necessarily connote deep hostility to civil rights. But in Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana, it was a rare Republican leader in the late 1960s and early 1970s who wasn’t a former Dixiecrat or Golderwatercrat or closely aligned with them.
All of this is simply to say that amnesia or verbal carelessness on the political events of the 1960s may be permissable for many politicians, but not for someone with Barbour’s (or Lott’s) background. It’s like forgetting your middle name, and I just don’t believe it happens innocently, particularly with someone who has Barbour’s more recent record of allegedly color-blind reactionary policies.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The last few months of 2010 have been illuminating when it comes to the priorities of the Republican Party. By jumping at the Obama-McConnell tax deal, Republicans underscored the fact that protecting the marginal tax rates of high earners–not reducing the federal deficit, and not even denying Obama legislative success–is their party’s primary focus at the federal level. It says something that most conservatives who opposed the tax deal did so on the grounds that it was not permanent, or that it did not completely eliminate the estate tax. As ever, to paraphrase Dick Cheney, Republicans seem to think deficits don’t matter.
Yet that’s not the half of it. For a true litmus test of the lengths Republicans will and will not go to in order defend the incomes of the very rich, you have to look to the states, where budget deficits are generally not allowed. There, a new crop of Republican governors and lawmakers–huge numbers of which rode to power on the Tea Party wave–are focused not just on preserving upper-income tax cuts, but actually cutting taxes for the rich while slashing services and raising taxes on the poor and middle class. All this is happening at a crucial time, since the most dire fiscal conditions in decades are about get vastly worse, as federal stimulus dollars run out.
One of the GOP’s biggest 2010 rock stars, Governor-elect Nikki Haley of South Carolina, is an especially instructive example: During the campaign, Haley came out for abolition of the state corporate-income tax. Facing an enormous and chronic state budget shortfall, she breezily suggested that her tax cut might be paid for by eliminating a recently enacted state sales-tax exemption for food purchases, because the exemption “didn’t create one job.” This statement, which seems to imply that eating is an economically useless activity, takes conservative disdain for consumption as a growth generator to new heights. Instead of trying to keep food on South Carolinians’ tables and consumer demand high, Haley is betting on a tax code tilted to “producers” and “job creators.” As Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey recently explained:

We are a right-to-work state. We keep the unions out. And if we become a no-­corporate-income-tax state as well, we will become a magnet for businesses to come to South Carolina. And that means more jobs for our citizens, more con­tracts for our small busi­nesses, and more growth for our economy.

It’s hard to imagine a more enthusiastic endorsement of the old moonlight-and-magnolias approach of making lower business costs–including taxes, wages, and all those inconvenient regulations aimed at protecting the workforce or the environment–the sole strategy for economic development, at the expense of other public and private goods.
A similar thing is happening next door in Georgia, where outgoing Republican Governor Sonny Perdue created a heavily loaded fiscal commission tasked with addressing the state’s massive budget gap. (Incoming Republican Governor Nathan Deal is expected to embrace the report.) It suggests “redirecting the state’s taxing emphasis to what people buy and the services they use rather than the income they earn,” meaning adoption of a higher sales tax, paired with corporate and upper-income tax cuts and cuts in government services, and speaks somewhat dismissively of “advocates for the poor and elderly [who] stress that those groups spend a higher percentage of their income on goods and services that would be taxed under the Republicans’ scenario.” And Florida’s state budget situation may be even worse than South Carolina’s and Georgia’s–education costs for Haitian refugees are a major new problem–but Governor-elect Rick Scott is committed to both the elimination of corporate taxes and major reductions in property taxes that support local schools.
This trend is by no means confined to the South. Newly elected Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is insistently pushing for reductions in business taxes, which would double the state’s current $1.5 billion budget shortfall. In Pennsylvania, Governor-elect Tom Corbett is determined to cut corporate taxes by nearly one-third while increasing business deductions. Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker, who made headlines by turning down $810 million in federal money for a high-speed rail connection between Milwaukee and Madison, has pledged to cut corporate taxes for smaller employers, and also wants to give a state tax break that will encourage people to snap up those hardy conservative pet rocks, health savings accounts. Walker is facing a two-year, $3 billion budget shortfall. Ohio Governor-elect John Kasich, who, like Walker, turned down federal high-speed rail money, is pushing to restore a previously delayed state income-tax cut, even though his two-year budget shortfall is about $8 billion.
This is what Americans got when they voted for the Tea Party. When the last comparable wave of state-level Republicans took office, in 1994, it happened to coincide with the beginning of the long boom of the ’90s, which allowed GOP officeholders to make popular tax cuts without reducing popular spending. Not this time: Across the country, Republicans are assuring that budget adjustments will be real and painful for everybody but the rich.

TDS is pleased to publish this Strategy Memo by Andrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA and the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics.
The arguments among Democrats and progressives over President Obama’s tax deal have revealed disagreements over many things: strategy, tactics, principles, history. But some of the most bitter criticisms have involved matters of loyalty and political character. The deal–and even more, Obama’s testy criticism of “purist” and “sanctimonious” critics of the deal–were seen as insulting Obama’s most fervent supporters. And the insult was compounded because it came from a President whom many activists had once regarded as one of their own. The transformational speaker and former community organizer seemed to be openly disavowing not only his base but part of himself.
In contrast, many of the President’s defenders have said that Obama was always at heart a legislative deal-maker, and that followers who expected anything different had only themselves to blame.
I favor a third alternative: that Obama was indeed disavowing a part of himself, but that he was right to do so. In my book, Ruling Passions, I extensively examined and compared the roles played by three major kinds of political leaders: activists, organizers and legislators. I argued that all three contribute crucial things to democratic politics–but very different things, normally best performed by very different kinds of people.
One of the book’s central conclusions was that the same person was unlikely to be able to play more than one of these roles well, and that those who did move from one role to another would have to radically shift their ways of acting, and perhaps even their character, in order to succeed. Applied to what’s happening now, this analysis suggests that Obama has very valid reasons for making a change from one role to another, even at the cost of leaving behind some roles that once helped define him, but that he now needs to clearly define and embrace a new role.
Moral Activists
Obama’s remarks, stressing pragmatism and results over “a purist position and no victories for the American people,” took aim at a kind of politics that I called “moral activism.” Moral activists–like Frederick Douglass, Francis Willard, and Martin Luther King–channel the prophetic or jeremiad tradition in American thought and rhetoric. They draw organizational strength and moral authority from communities that are religious or quasi-religious in character, focused on morals as much as politics. That said, activists’ public appeals are not sectarian but appeal to common and perennial American principles. Moral activists demand that we take seriously the true meaning of our ideals: liberty, democracy, equality, the pursuit of happiness.
The preferred political activity of moral activists is speech; their preferred path to political progress not the brokering of deals but the conversion of souls. Accordingly, while not opposed to all compromise, they deeply suspect the rhetoric of compromise, any suggestion that a current half-measure is a final destination rather than a short rest stop on the way to a final goal.
When activists do seek out political allies they demand that those allies’ commitment to the cause approach their own (in steadiness if not intensity); they are fond of pledges and promises and take them very seriously. For all their talk of urgency, they typically think of progress on a scale of generations. Their favorite line is taken from Martin Luther King (though not original with him): “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And uniquely among political types, Moral Activists can and do display a sympathy towards permanent minorities and the politically disenfranchised that politicians who practice majoritarian politics cannot afford to match.

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