Ezra Klein: "It's the Washington Way"

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen my name is andrew samwick and i'm the director of the nelson a Rockefeller Center here at Dartmouth College I guess I'm the one being referred to in the in the title slide it's one of the perks of my job that I get to invite people to campus who have had a noticeable influence on the way I think about the world and it's my pleasure to introduce you to one of those people this afternoon Ezra Klein is a columnist for The Washington Post and a contributor to MSNBC he writes speaks and blogs about economic and domestic policy and lots of it he has a keen understanding of the way Washington works and the way it doesn't work to translate ideas and preferences into public policy I'm very grateful that he has joined us today to share his unique insights into a political system that becomes stranger and more opaque every day there are so many seemingly intractable problems in the world of Public Policy today where does one begin for me the answer every weekday morning is with an email from Ezra Klein called wonk book if you are not a subscriber then you are really missing out this morning within moments of opening the email you would have gotten three things from the headline story first you would have gotten the news that the gang of six senators working on a compromise to resolve our debt crisis had become a gang of five with a defection of Republican Tom Coburn over a proposal to put a global cap on Medicare expenditures second you would have gotten the links to the relevant stories and opinions from across the web by other journalists and commentators on why this happened and what it means third if it were only the news and the links you could be just about anywhere on the web what makes wonk book uniquely worth reading is that you also get the perspective that is so often missing when the need to be everywhere first crowds out the need to be right just where you are what you would have gotten from Ezra this morning and what you will hear more of this afternoon went a little something like this gangs of well-meaning bipartisan leaning leaders embody how we want Washington to work and as such they frequently received glowing excited coverage but at least lately they don't seem to be how Washington actually works the inspirational theory underlying most of these efforts that a few well-meaning individuals can overcome pipe can overcome partisanship interest group pressure and in so doing inspire their colleagues to slip free of the surly bonds of politics and do what's right tends to work in reverse with a few well-meaning individuals succumbing to the realization that the plan can't pass and they may not even be able to survive advocating it news links and perspective all before 7:00 in the morning and all free of charge if an economist ever tells you that there's no such thing as a free lunch forward him long book and tell him to come up with a new theory Ezra has been at the cutting edge of media and commentary since 2003 when he started his first blog while still an undergraduate at the University of California his media presence continued to grow after he graduated from UCLA with a degree in political science his blog moved to progressively larger audiences first to the American Prospect and then exactly two years ago today to the Washington Post where he became the Washington Post first pure blogger on politics and economics ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming azhar Klein I'm all I'm so appreciative to Andrew for the introduction and particularly that he likes walk book which I wake up every morning at 6 to do and so I care about it people like it because it is ruining my life and I shouldn't have signed up to do it in the first place um anyway Thank You Dartmouth for having me and I am going to offer up a presentation today that I think I'll have a little bit cleaner of a name than I then it was a than I originally identity process stupid or why Washington seems to suck and keep sucking no matter what anybody does about it and the place I would begin is with some advice your mom probably gave you which is don't join a gang in the Senate gangs don't tend to work very well there was a gang of six if you remember that was Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley and a handful of other senators who were gonna solve the healthcare reform problem in a bipartisan way no there was the other gang a six the one that just fell apart today that was a gang of bipartisan senators who are gonna blah blah blah the blah blah blah in a bipartisan way that didn't work the gang of more than six ran by Ron Wyden and bob bennett who are gonna had a health care bill called the Affordable Care Act very good bill had about 13 Democrats and Republicans on it never got a floor vote there is Graham Kerry Lieberman if you think that worked I would ask you where our cap-and-trade bill is to deal with carbon pricing so not so much and so the question is why do all these nice people keep failing us is it that is it that John Kerry is not a fun guy to be around I mean does it seem very fun but Lindsey Graham seems fun enough for two people is it that gang's need more than six feet I mean what is it so here's what I don't think it is this is from Marco Rubio senator from Florida and it's adorbs look at that look how nice his family looks and we get this type of thing all the time in campaigns I mean here's his son and his wife who he met when he was however old and there's a dog and by the end of campaigns you may not know what anybody thinks we need to do about health care or the economy but you will know goddamnit married to somebody who is blonde and this is true on the left as well except that Michael Bennett is married to Burnett but he's not had a lot more luck than Marco Rubio so I would submit to you that the fact that these people are or are presenting themselves at least as family men is not incredibly important information for how they're actually going to govern but it is information I mean if you go look on the YouTube pages for candidates everyone has this ad called family and it's like this sort of soaring music it's like I met Ann when I was 15 and I knew right then that this is how I was gonna solve the budget crisis no so it never works real talk nobody else in Washington cares that you love your family nobody passes a public option because you love your family nobody passes cap-and-trade because you love your family your individual characteristics the little special snowflake I know and that you told me that you are does not matter because here's a realer talk Mitch McConnell does not care that you love your family Mitch McConnell doesn't care about your family at all and Mitch McConnell is super important because he is the most honest man in Washington Mitch McConnell if you want to know what's going on in Washington I swear he's the only person you need to listen to he is dead I mean he you all see the Incredibles the movie it's animated superheroes you know what I mean superheroes are gonna figure in this presentation soon actually supervillains but good movie and it had a great term for something that happens in comic books and movies all the time it's called monologuing where the sort of the villain is always you know you get him talking and then he sort of well the reason I was doing this is because my mother never loved me and so I thought if I rob the bank mekomo is a great monologue er if you just let him talk whatever his sort of plan is he's just gonna tell it to you straight so I've got oh why didn't those pop up in order oh god damn it okay um these are the most important things you need to know about what is being done or said or thought in Washington over the last couple of years Mitch McConnell number one and Mitch McConnell I should say maybe people don't know Mitch McConnell is the leader of the Senate minority he's a leader of the Senate Republicans and he's very good at his job number one the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president this is true and it is something that people usually don't tell you but of course the single most important thing that a political party wants to achieve is to get the guys they don't agree with out of the presidency and get themselves into it it's not a secret but it isn't something people in Washington say they pretend we want to work together we would like to be bipartisan we are very interested in Barack Obama's continued success in his health and we hope that he serves president for many many terms and never leaves that isn't how anything goes but because we keep listening to these people suggest it what they really want to do is get together in a bipartisan way and solve problems as opposed to win the next goddamn election and have the power to solve those problems themselves we get fooled all the time so Mitch McConnell number two explaining how he does legislating and why there's no bipartisanship in Washington we worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals because we thought correctly I think and it is correct that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on is if the measures were not bipartisan so the only way the American people would know that these measures were partisan and that this was supposed to be a debate and they were supposed to think the Democrats were not doing a good job was for the measures to not be bipartisan which is why none of Mitch McConnell's people would cross the line to vote for anything god damn it I really didn't do this well I had this whole cool reveal thing going on but now I don't okay so McConnell continues to explain it all Mike Allen asked Mitch McConnell something Mike Allen is a reporter for Politico and Mitch McConnell said it was about compromise if the president is willing to do what I and my members would do anyway we're not gonna say no all right that's cool so and I had this this was supposed to reveal because it's gonna be escalating Lee funny but now it won't be al Allen replies but that's not much of a concession that's not bargaining to just give you what you want and becomin replies in true like sort of like super villain under the volcano fashion um I like to think I'm a pretty good negotiator and he totally is that's really good negotiating and it's really good negotiating because it screws over Barack Obama and when Barack Obama gets screwed over two things happen number one it becomes less likely to get reelected and Mitch McConnell becomes a lot more likely to get policies he likes enacted and number two and I think number two is arguably more important it drags policies to the right because since nobody is cooperating with Obama and he can't cut the different sort of deals that you would cut if you had a lot of different votes in play and this is important it becomes incumbent to get ben nelsons vote to get the most conservative Democratic senator to give them all the power now this is I think very unintuitive but I think it's very it's very important we tend to think of bipartisan outcomes being the result of bipartisan processes and in fact it can be exactly the opposite that the fact of the matter is that the substantive outcomes that McConnell is getting are more conservative by not cooperating than they would be if he actually cooperated because Democrats just simply can't have any they don't have any freedom to move if his people were free to vote for anything they wanted and if Obama had all of his Democrats in the game and let's say bob bennett who was a former senator just lost in the last election because senator from utah let's say he really cared about delivery system reform and so they made it easier to pay for quality as opposed to pay for volume and you got Bob Bennett's vote but you didn't have to give away something that was a point of partisan contention well now the bill just gets a little bit more liberal because you can give away Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman who won't let you have Medicare buy-in and put that back in the bill so actually Mitch McConnell is right here I just want to mention his final quote which actually isn't Sarah welcome to my presentation but once you've heard all these you know everything in Washington so I figure it's a public service if there is a grand bargain of some kind with the President of the United States none of it will be usable for either side in next year's election none of it now this is again important to forecast from the next couple of months to understanding what opportunity McConnell sees here it's a moment of divided government and if he can get a sort of unpopular Medicare cuts and so forth in they won't be usable against him the next election because Obama the Democrats will also be culpable but what's important about that is it's inverse when you can force people when you can force Democrats to do their bill on their own when you don't have his fingerprints on it the bill only gets blamed on the Democrats and vice versa the same for the Republicans if it's only their bill only gets blamed on them so staying keeping your side from getting involved in legislation from cooperating constructively there's two things it one drags the legislation two if you're Republicans and you're not getting involved to the right and B makes it so Democrats have to essentially deal with it all on their own they have to deal with the consequences of entirely on their own it's a very sort of smart negotiating strategy and it explains why Mitch McConnell would sooner kill you and watch you bleed on the floor than enter into a bipartisan negotiation with Democrats and that's why gangs of sixes don't work so the question I want to pose at this juncture in the presentation is why is dr. doom who you can see there in a photograph from 1997 why is dr. doom effective now you might say it's well I don't know what you would say actually maybe because he's very evil but it's not and it's not because his mother didn't like him and it isn't because he's a family man if you ask dr. doom he would tell you I am possessed of power which defies description which isn't super useful so I went to a more credible source and Wikipedia explains that dr. doom is a polymath scientific genius depicted constructing numerous devices in order to defeat his foes or gain more power including a time machine and device to imbue people with superpowers and numerous robots now the point of that is that dr. doom himself he could be as evil as he wanted he could hate his family as much as he wanted he could have been you know not picked for the team's as a kid and all that he could have all the classic reasons you might become a villain although a lot of people with those situations don't become villains and they're nice and maybe some of you had that issue but that's not why Doctor Doom was development he was a villain because he had power because he was a polymath scientific genius who could do all this stuff and that was very important for Doctor Doom so the question I think that you have to look at in Washington is what gives people power to create outcomes like this not who they are but what is the structure where is the power and I would say that it's in this graph now this graph the bottom 66 70 74 that's congressional that's Congress number so this Congress is a hundred and twelfth and before that was a hundred eleventh in the hundred tenth and what you're seeing is the rise of the filibuster cloture is a vote you take to kill a filibuster it's a vote you take to end a filibuster now as you can see basically for most of American history we don't filibuster very much and when we do nobody does anything about it this really begins to change in the 80s which is around where you're seeing that spike in the night around the 90th Congress suddenly and for reasons that political scientists disagree about you begin to see an uptick in filibustering and then in the 90s it's skyrockets and then in the US and particularly last two years it just goes through the roof we have had more filibusters in the last couple of years I think it's what this says now nope that's comes later we have had more filibusters in the last couple of years than we had in the 1950s 60s and 70s combined that's a lot of goddamn filibustering and it's very important for reasons I will get to on this graph which was definitely the one I thought was gonna come next the minority and I think this is the central sentence to understanding how Washington works at least under only at least under unified government right now the minority has both the incentive and the power to make the majority fail I said again the minority is both the incentive and the power to make the majority fell now if the minority had simply the incentive to make the majority fail they just wanted Barack Obama to screw up well so what lots of people want me to fail I mean no matter and if they had the power to make the majority fell but not the incentive which is to say my fiancee for instance definitely has a power to make me fail she could poison my cereal she could say mean things to me before I go to work and then I'd be angry she could blow up my house she could hide my keys there are all sorts of things that my fiancee could do but as of yet she does not have the incentive we're getting married soon maybe that will change but in the Senate they do the way the Senate works and I think this is the the what central understanding it is that it's imagine yourself in an office and if the boss likes your work we work next to one another and if he likes what guy in the blue jacket does better than what I do he fires me so this creates a couple of interesting questions for me one should I collaborate with guy in the blue sweater on his work and make it better and the answer is no and the second question is should I sabotage guy in the blue sweaters work and I would never do that guy in the blue sweater but I should and that's what they do in the Senate they sabotage each other's work and this is both sides the Democrats tend to filibuster a little bit less than Republicans but that's a pretty steady rise I mean Democrats were filibustering a hell of a lot more in the 90s and Republicans were in the 80s I mean so this is both parties here okay now what's funny about the rise of the filibuster is it it shouldn't be this way at all it is easier than at any other point in our history to break a filibuster it has never been this easy to do until 1917 you couldn't break it at all I should actually back up for a quick bit of history here just show of hands how many people think filibustering the filibuster was in the Constitution good you know people in the Senate say that all the time Judd Gregg has senator Judd Gregg or ex senator Judd Gregg now has been on the floor assent and said in the Constitution but it's not and he's wrong and I said so here but the filibuster was as Sarah binder who's a political scientist I think it's a brookings explained to me was an accident John Adams having I think was John Adams or maybe was an errand burner actually anyway someone came back to the Senate having shot Alexander Hamilton if I'm remembering this correctly is that right Alexander Hamilton's when it got shot right yes okay so as Aaron Burr then came back to the Senate and he couldn't serve a senate majority leader anymore because he had shot Alexander Hamilton which was considered to have been a bad thing to have done so he came back though and he gave this sort of valedictory address and he said look you're a great body it's been terrific to serve with all of you but your rulebook is totally screwed up but nothing makes any sense you have all these rules that repeat so you should make all these changes and I have them written out for you and basically they made all these changes while making all these changes they deleted something called the motion to move to the next question or something like that the motion of called a question rule this was a motion where you would say I move to move to the next item of business and then we'd have a vote and it would either happen or not having no now however that got deleted accidentally and so three or four or five decades later somebody realizes actually I can just keep talking because without unanimous consent anybody can object and then I can't be stopped so thus was a filibuster born now that didn't work well for reasons you might be able to intuit without me explaining it a great detail so in 1917 Woodrow Wilson convinced the Senate to create cloture and now if two-thirds of the Senators present and voting if I'm remoting the nomenclature right I said so you could shut it down and then 75 we brought it down to 60 again and yet it's become more and more and more and more prevalent the Senate has been trying to get away from the filibuster for about a century now and they just keep sort of it keeps becoming more of an issue for them which is a nice lesson in unintended consequences so I've told you that stat any already so it's not needed here now one of the problems about the filibuster and one of the things that I think people don't totally understand about the way it perverts the entire process and creates outcomes nobody really wants is that it makes it very very difficult for the public to hold legislators accountable now the public doesn't do what I do they do not report on the minutiae of congressional procedure that is not their job they're not interested in it and as you can see in this pupil they don't actually know how Congress works very well 25 percent of people think you need 51 votes to break a filibuster found another 12 percent I think you need either 67 or 75 and most people just don't know only 26% know you need 60 votes so the most central way business gets done in the Senate and most people don't even know in theory how it works I mean literally in theory not whether or not health care is filibustered but just what would you do if there was a filibuster so that I think is a very profound statement about how closely people can really keep an eye on this on this sort of congressional minutia now that shouldn't be such a big deal what political scientists will tell you voters do and it's basically rational and it basically works out is to take a look around them in November and then decide if these guys did a good job now it's not totally fair perhaps the economy claps for reasons having nothing to do with your actions but overall it's not the worst way of doing it in the world it has something to recommend it I think the only problem is that in fact you're actually looking around and seeing outcomes it may have actually not been created by the majority party who you're either punishing or not punishing you're seeing outcomes created by the minority party now as I write here the way this should normally work and now I'm just repeating myself that I wrote it better here and forgot to have this slide is that we throw the bastards out when we don't like them we elected new bastards the new bastards enact the new bastard deal the electorate judges result in the new bastard deal and then we decide whether or not to throw them out and elect new er bastards that is a pretty good cause in effect I have passed a law and you are either getting healthcare or not or my stimulus bills either helping me economy or it isn't or whatever it might be it's a little bit of a short timeframe to judge some of this stuff but you know this is good enough for government work so to speak and you could imagine you a pretty fair approximation of of blame I'm unfortunate isn't what we end up doing we throw them out then new bastards come in then the bastards we just threw out obstruct the new bastards I mean remember when Barack Obama came in he see that giant filibuster spike there had been two two wave elections for Democrats in row six you know it were massive Democratic sweeps they had a larger majority in the Senate than we had seen in 30 years but the Republicans came in and I mean there was no one they were just a complete disreputable party at this point they came in though and they said sorry guys we're just not gonna let you do what you want to do and they obstructed it and people watch this horrifying congressional process in which you know Ben Nelson was getting kickbacks for Nebraska because he was essentially king of the Senate at that point and you know there was endless partisan warfare and everything was taking forever and the stimulus was you can argue maybe you think it would never have worked but if you believe what the Democrats believed it was too small and blah blah blah blah and you just look at Washington you're like well this is no better so new bastards come back in and of course they fail to change the tone of Washington and they fail to solve the problems that have been lingering with us for so long and they don't have much of a record and then we throw them out again and that's been how it's been going on there's actually been an interesting phenomenon in politics in last 20 or so years which is it it's become much more competitive the house has changed hands three times where in the 40 years before that it didn't change hands once so something has happened and I think a large part of the explanation is a filibuster wherein the two parties have figured out how to make politics more competitive again and I think a big part of that and a lot of the people you'll talk to in the house I spoke to Steny Hoyer who's Minority Whip right now used to be a majority leader and he thinks it's all Newt Gingrich's fault because he figured out how to do this working with Bob Dole in 94 but he really thinks that you know what they figured out was it you cannot get reelected if people like the majority and the best way to make people like the majority is to not let them govern and now that's fine for the majorities and minorities who keep coming back but it isn't very good for us because we don't get effectively governed oh that happens too oh my god so many bastards now one question that I might get at this point and in the argument is well what about bipartisanship if you eliminate the filibuster won't you lose that incentive for bipartisanship that need to bring the other party into the game and isn't that really important and I would agree with you that bringing the other party into the game is important if for no other reason then they're beholden to a different set of greedy bloodsuckers and you are and so perhaps in the middle of that Venn diagram of greedy bloodsuckers you can find more ways to enact good policy because you get protection from business because unions are helping you or vice versa and you know it creates more sort of constellations of compromise than you have if you really only have to deal with your party's interest groups so in theory it's great to have the other party involved in the filibuster is when you hear people explain it the filibuster is part of how you do that only I actually think that's dead wrong the central point I've been trying to make to you with Mitch McConnell quotes and Doctor Doom things and all the other is it for the minority the best thing they can do to get back into power is to keep the majority from governing to kill the bill what Rachel Maddow calls the Tarrantino because it kills bills but it may not be the case that if you can't kill the bill that if the majority can just pass a bill without you that if you can't kill the bill that your second best option is to vote no it may be that your second best option if you simply know that there's a majority and they're gonna get to do what they want and your choices are there to vote no ineffectually or to participate that your best option is to help write the bill because at some point the people in your district the hospitals and the businesses and even the voters are gonna say you know look we keep electing you but you're just voted no on everything and you're not bringing anything home for us because they have no reason to give you anything so you're not doing a very good job representing our interests and we're gonna send if you don't shape up we're gonna send someone out there willing to play the game but songs we don't do that so long is killing the bill as an option so long as Mitch McConnell can can come to you and say listen I know you might want to vote for this but we got to stick together and if we do the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is who we come back into power because they don't get to govern in the electorate doesn't like it when you can't govern if Mitch McConnell has to come in come over to you and say well just vote no on everything because you don't like them and at the end of this the majority will been able to govern very successfully and you just won't have been a part of it not a very compelling speech so in essential summation although not quite let me actually just make one point before I go into this part which is that the filibuster is one example of what I'm talking about the beginning of this presentation what I have on the initial side which is it the process of the structure of matters Washington matters much more on Washington people realize but there are other things to the Congressional Budget Office is a boring agency that assesses how much bills cost that isn't very interesting but it is immensely powerful because the two sides have agreed that they will abide essentially but what the Congressional Budget Office says and so with the commercial budget office will say will work essentially gets into the bill and what they say doesn't work it doesn't get in the bill or at least has to be counterbalanced by more things that they're willing to agree to for instance you have right now an enormous number of caps in all the budget bills so everybody's saying we will bring Medicare spending down to GDP plus one for 20 years and we're just promising you that we're going to do that or we will bring discretionary spending down to 2008 levels for 10 years and we're promising you're gonna do that that's a little bit weird to keep doing that instead of just to say here's what we're gonna do but CBO will score that they won't score are you saying well we think we have this way too we think we have this way to change the Medicare program such that sick people don't cost as much money and so we're gonna do that and we think it'll work but if it doesn't work we're gonna revisit it if CBO doesn't think it'll work you don't get you're not officially saving the money CBO turns out to be wrong a lot obviously they're just doing their best to guess and they're a very good organization I really do as good a job as anybody I think could in that position but how legislation looks often is really dependent on the Congressional Budget Office much more so than on any individual senator even we're talking about the people who are writing the bill Max Baucus basically spent most of his here begging the guy who runs a Congressional Budget Office to score what he had in his health care proposal and I mean you can just sort of go down the line like this there's just a lot beyond individual senators and congressmen that matters but the one sort of lever we know how to pull is the one that sort of gives us individuals and when things aren't going in a way that we like in a way that we feel comfortable with we sort of pull that lever again and again and again we say to people well I am unlike him a family man or I am unlike him a businessman or I am unlike him a Republican or a Democrat and that is gonna solve what you don't like about Washington but the reality is what people don't like about Washington they've not liked now for quite a while they've not liked it across both parties and I think it's time to assume that what people don't like about Washington is perhaps more structural more about how Washington works no matter who the individuals are inside of it as opposed to who those individuals are who keep seeming to be standing around the Washington doesn't work which is there's a good line from Evan Bayh which I don't have in this in this presentation but which senator Evan Bayh who not know he used to be a senator you don't really need anything more than that but who said when he resigned to go become a lobbyist that and that is what he did he said that we had begun winning power in a way that makes using power impossible and he's right about that he said you know my colleagues and I are good people trapped in a bad system and I basically think that he's got the the analysis they're exactly right that these are not bad people they don't go to Washington because they want to screw you over just because they want to become lobbyists or because they're on the take not most of them anyway they go there because they really think they can help and a lot of them work really hard to to help and they just sort of crashed to the shoals of a system that at this point isn't working very well but we don't care about that we don't care about that system we care about how well things are working for us and so we keep pulling this lever that isn't fixing what is ultimately bugging us so anyway an answer to too much of this maybe that's another Doctor Doom photo just because I thought it was funny and at this point I think they're gonna come around with microphones so you can ask me questions and tell me why I'm wrong so thank you yeah so broad breast picture here the American public through the bums out that passed the health care bill and because the impression was that it it's a catastrophic health care bill it's a catastrophe it's a bad bill it's a terrible bill my read is that you know are things being equal 35% of the people in the country vote Democrat 28% of the people in the country vote Republican 37% of the people will vote any way at all and because 37 percent of people actually don't read it's just the impression of what's going on that sways the electorate and because you had to read to pack up the sixth paragraph of most every article or just kind of dig through the National Public Radio stories or any pretty much any other piece portraying the health care bill to to get to what was really so bad or not so bad about it that there was just basically this is a impression that was fueled by the media that it was really a terrible health care bill and that was a big part of why the Democrats got thrown out on mass I mean I and I know there was the stimulus and and but there was a similar portrayal of the stimulus bill which i think was a pretty terrible bill myself but it's like there's some quote it's like you got to do something and they did something they threw money wildly around but somebody had to throw money you know into the system you see so how much you concur with what they've got announced I think there are three things here there's a question of how good or bad different bills are there's a question of how people vote and this question of how they get information fair enough you're all readers you're all here at Dartmouth College as I've been informed not University you're all here at a wonky talk of a political writer and you're probably pretty proud of yourselves actually you're probably you're informed American citizen you know brush the dirt off your shoulder the only problem is that you guys are probably gigantic liars and the reason I say that is that then they on the floor so the theory we have is that if we read we know and if you read my blog actually you do you get a perfectly straightforward way so that's true if you're one of my readers but if you're not what political scientist found and this is I think one of the most depressing findings in political science is it the more you know the more informed you are the more likely you are to do what they call partisan self-deception so if you ask people of both parties a question with an answer did GDP grow during Bill Clinton's time in office what you'll find is something like this people who have no reason to not believe the true answer will all agree it did so Democrats all know that the economy did well under Bill Clinton but if you ask Republicans or Republicans who don't follow politics very closely also know the economy did pretty well under Bill Clinton but Republicans who are super highly informed will say it didn't and it's hard to get at the reasoning for this exactly the causality of it exactly but my strong hypothesis is and I see it on the Democratic side too that essentially as we sort into more partisan forms of media there are so many goddamn facts everywhere do you consume you can make a case for anything you want to believe anything at all I mean the health care bill is a great example actually because we're just because we're talking about it um you would think this bill was the most liberal socialistic plot what did Mike Pence call like a Soviet gulag the individual mandate is an unconstitutional assault on Liberty foisted on you by the Democrats the individual mandate is an idea Republicans came up with in the 90s Mitt Romney passed it but not just at the state level in June of 2009 Chuck Rousey was saying an individual mandate is a bipartisan idea a bipartisan idea both parties liked it the whinin Bennett bill which was bipartisan had an individual mandate Bob Dole it supported individual mandates Newt Gingrich individual mandates but now I think just about no Republicans know that and I think it's the highly informed ones who know at least of all because the there it is so there's been such a deep world of sort of sort of anti individual mandate arguments created that it if you the more you're dug into it the crazier you think this bill is of course it's unconstitutional what was so unconstitutional why were republicans pushing in the 90s and oughts but this is how it works and how it works on both sides that you know if the economy is going launder Bill Clinton will you focus on the deficit with China and that seems pretty bad and you focus on our taxes are so high and that's probably choke enough all types of needed investments or if the for that matter if you the economy if the Iraq surge is turning things around in Iraq you focus on well maybe the the reporting on how many people are actually dying has become infected has become has become corrupted it was very very hard for a lot of liberals to believe that the surgery is actually calming things down in Iraq it took a very long time for that to take hold even if they're even after the information became very very solid so number one partisan self-deception is I think a big deal here it's a big deal in part for something else you brought up this 35 35 37 as you put it we don't have many independent voters we think we do they're about a third and a little bit more than that of the country says they're an independent voter but if you actually look at how they vote they're very strong partisans there are people who are true independent voters who are swing voters there just aren't that many of them and this is intuitively clear if you look at how elections go if you look at presidential elections that have high fairly high turnout Barack Obama won a landslide it was a big victory but in terms of what we've been doing recently 53% George Bush before him when a won a very very small first victory and uh you know in a slightly larger second victory but I mean we've really been right around 50 51 49 50 50 52 48 for quite a while now it's a very split country and that means that these people who apparently are swinging so far back and forth in every election aren't actually swinging these elections are decided in part due to turn out but in part just among a much smaller group of people than you think there does many fewer people who are persuadable I think part of the reason is just that people are affiliated with parties and the frustrating thing about covering policy and I didn't get into in the speech but usually what I cover in Washington is actually these details of things like the health care bill which we can go into if you'd like and almost none of the policy argument the most depressing thing for me is that almost none of the policy argument is on the level it's all people just bringing up whatever it is they need to bring up to win the next election I did this piece the other day if you really look closely at Barack Obama's record and this you can decide if this is good about him or bad about him but it is essentially his major policy initiatives are identical to what the Republican Party supported in the mid 90s the individual mandate health care bill the first president to look at that and create a bill for that was a George HW Bush the cap-and-trade plan again George HW Bush he wanted that for a sulphur dioxide and then a couple years later Newt Gingrich was saying we should do cap-and-trade for carbon well he's not saying that anymore but John McCain was the first to introduce a cap-and-trade bill in the into the Senate cap-and-trade was part of the Republican platform into Nate and now cap and trade is cap-and-tax it was actually the first Singh sir panel attacked after the election she had just run on a ticket supporting cap and trade I mean it was astonishing and then you know this idea that we can have any tax tax increases or revenue increases in a spending bill again Republicans don't like taxes but in the early 90s they had them so people just keep sort of flipping around depending on what they need in the next election and it's not just Republicans uh Mitt Romney had won the election if he had won in o8 and he had proposed his health care bill there's nobody in this room who can tell me with a straight face the final vote on that bill would have been 60 Democrats in the Senate and 220 in the house and no Republicans even as that Bills policy features were identical the vast majority of both politicians and people essentially go where their party tells them to go and it's understandable why I mean it's a lot of information out there and we we we outsource some of that work to other people were supposed to be doing it for us but those other people they're not worried about the policy they're worried about the election and maybe they're worried about it in a high-minded way if they win the next election they can make better policy but they are not fundamentally worried about the policy and so without the media doing any job of keeping the gold coast center keeping the goalpost Center it's somewhere and calling out people for at least being wildly inconsistent there's essentially no check on this sort of world of policy that is like Calvinball where you just make up your own rules whenever you feel like it and you make up a new history for yourself whenever you feel like it I'll just make one final point on this because Gingrich is this hilariously acrobatic example of it he was on he was on Meet the Press on Sunday and he said they said well what do you think of Paul Ryan's plan and he said oh that's right wing social engineering it says it's you know I don't like left wing social engineering and I don't like right wing social engineering and then they played a clip of him endorsing the individual mandate in 97 or whatever it was and he said yeah well I still you know I would support a variation of the individual mandate not the Obama bill you know but the VIN dividual mandate that's good you know I'd support something like that anyway a couple days later he gets enough blowback from his party and he says I totally support the Ryan and anybody who quotes me from Meet the Press is lying because I have disavowed what I said I mean and ok great we've always been at war with Eurasia but like this is this is how things go now and like honestly like some blogs a laugh at Newt Gingrich for this but within a couple months nobody remember it like it'll just be gone and nobody will care and like he'll just be anti Obamacare and that'll be how it works so I I'll leave it there and let this uh I have the impression that the only real policy-making branch of government these days is the Supreme Court but there's not to the checks on that branch of government don't seem to be very vibrant I know there's policy going through the Senate in the house and you know we did do the health care bill and the Supreme Court I mean one thing that I didn't get into here and I do think it's something people need to worry about it's ok let's just take the filibuster is the example how would you think to fix it well maybe you just want the Senate to get rid of it or make a threshold lower or something but maybe you say it's good for there to be gridlock that we don't want Washington doing too much we want it to be slow we want molasses in the machinery of democracy and fair enough it's a fair point the problem is that gridlock isn't a really great metaphor or image for what happens we gridlock is nothing happening gridlock is you're sitting in traffic what actually happens is that these fundamental actions get out sourced so instead of passing a cap-and-trade bill or some sort of energy bill through Congress but instead got filibuster a to pass the house but not the Senate and so the Environmental Protection Agency is going to go after carbon autonomously it'll be a regulatory body that does it and the Supreme Court is taking over frankly a lot more power in a lot of legislative decisions you know they actually told the EPA they had to do carbon a couple years ago the federal reserve is taking on a much more aggressive role in managing the economy after the financial crisis and they've admitted I mean there have been report reporting on this that they would collaborate they would communicate with Barney Frank and other members of Congress who are relevant in economic policymaking and they would these members of Congress would say listen we can't move that quick you're gonna have to do it and they would they wildly stretch their powers over what anybody had conceived of them being before but that was in part because Congress couldn't do it and so part of what happens is that the less you can let less Congress is capable of actually doing the more of it that gets outsourced to other actors I mean and you can sort of just go right down the line you wait long enough on them on actually doing a deficit reduction bill because nobody can actually move any bills in Congress and they don't want and they don't want the other side to both attack them and then kill the goddamn bill and then in some ways you're waiting for a fiscal crisis so the actual agency is outsourced to the bond market this is not great it makes government not it makes it slower maybe but also it makes it less accountable it makes it um word in part of the health care bill and I think this is a good idea given the realities of it but it turns over a lot of decisions in Medicare to a nod to you know an unelected Board of of independent experts who can make decisions without Congress saying yes that if you're really worried about how much Congress does and doesn't do that's not great for you but it is increasingly what we're doing it is an increasing it is an increasing part of our way of responding to a system that doesn't work which isn't that you accept that nothing works anymore it's that you create alternatives and maybe those alternatives have to work more inefficiently or have to be more secretive but at least you're getting something done yeah you've been doing some great coverage of the debt thank you I have if I mean it's really been good and a couple days ago you just it was a really quick blurb that really caught my attention you wrote about the 14th amendment section 4 about how the public debt of the United States shall not go in question apparently that's language direct from the Constitution and you followed that up with the potential for possibly Timothy Geithner or the US Treasury to issue illegal US Treasuries on the market past the debt limit do you see any possibility of the executive branch stepping into the debt limit fight to cash flow management I think what you're referring to isn't something I wrote but something a guy named Bruce Bartlett wrote and Bruce Bartlett is he's a former Reagan administration official very very smart economist that actually Co blogs with uh with mr. Samuel care and I think my comment on this was it it's probably not a great idea to mix the debt ceiling showdown with a constitutional crisis in which the executive branch decides that they don't need Congress to raise the debt limit but what would you like me to do do you do you need me to have this honor can I just talk loudly people the future we are doing this for you can I turn this down maybe do I sound fine now okay all right so anyway I don't think that's gonna be that's gonna end up being an outcome anybody's gonna be comfortable with but again it goes to show that there are things that we need to do and if we can't do them eventually gonna have to find some way and maybe that way will be an emergency bill in Congress or maybe it'll be that eventually people begin sort of pushing and pushing and pushing on how much power you have in the executive branch certainly that has happened in the National Security arena tomorrow for instance is 60 days since we entered Libya that means under the War Powers Act Congress has got to do something about it raise their hand II think Congress is gonna take that one up but over time you know this becomes sort of a big deal I think the amount of stuff it gets devolved in the amount of sort of extraordinary workarounds we have to develop because one other thing about these workarounds is they're often not the best way to do it Congress has an enormous amount of power and the executive branch doesn't and when things have to move out to the executive branch of the Supreme Court of Federal Reserve you often have to do them in a roundabout way where a they're not as accountable would be they don't work that well and and it's a real problem and it's not something that I think people who talk about oh the filibuster is part of our tradition think enough about when you really go back to the to the founding of the Constitution the idea was for Congress to really be the seat of what happens in government I mean didn't see first body mentioned in the Constitution it is empowered in a way the other bodies simply aren't they're not even close but as Congress begins less and less capable of working the executive becomes simply more and more and more powerful and so people who talk about how well what's really great about the Senate is its protection for people who don't want to let anything get done and that's like what our country was founded on the ability to not address any of our pressing problems I think they need to think a little bit harder about what the long form outcome of that is because eventually you don't end up in a place where nothing is getting done and our problems disappear you get into a place where our problems have become so threatening and pressing that we're trying to address them in in whatever possible way we can and I'll say one final thing on this I think one meant model people have of democracy in the back of the heads yeah nothing works but you can sort of bash in if you like break glass in case of emergency box and then they'll get it done they'll pass tarp on the second trial to do whatever they need to do I come from California in California we have a 67 vote limit our two-thirds majority I'm sorry for passing a budget or doing anything with taxes or really doing any fiscal management whatsoever things have escalated and escalated and escalated and escalated and escalated California is about I think to sell itself to Walmart for sponsorship to try to get out of the hole and it didn't work the two parties didn't come together and they didn't come together in part because the Republicans sell an opportunity of saying well screw you guys this is our path back to power you guys have really screwed this up we're gonna get back in on this and they weren't right about that but and it continued not be right about it but now they have Jerry Brown to try and screw over it didn't work and so you just have a very very high level of gridlock creating an absolute fiscal catastrophe in that state and these things do not get better necessarily the the idea that we don't really need to worry about them because we always come through in the end what we do until we don't and it's a hell of a lot better to fix problems when they're tractable than when they stop being tractable or when or when fixing them requires running through some type of unnecessary emergency yeah yeah I come from California to actually when they got a population of like 36 million and there's only 80 people in their house and New Hampshire's nice guys the population is like 1.3 and there's 400 in the house so my question for you is obviously on the United States government we have like a much bigger problem on that in terms of the different disparity there at what point do we accept that mass democracy just doesn't work or at what point do we accept that the American government is just isn't going to work and we start pursuing like local alternatives to democracy or do you even do you even support that or what were the alternatives be like new like in just in New Hampshire in general we pass we start taking more power to the states I in local democracies where we have more power to say what goes on where we can actually go to Concord and testify and be heard in a more powerful way and ideas they mean more our voices mean more so at what point do we just accept that the American government doesn't work or that it's broken and unfixable is is there a point to that do you do you or I I would be well I'm not sure if I'm I'm it sort of sounds like what you're saying is like at what point do we become fascist and I think we're not going to become fascist but your example example of New Hampshire it seems to be at what point do we have more congressional testimony and I think we might do that so but somewhere between those is I think we're going to be obviously a lot of power devolves we get power to the states we give it a Supreme Court we give it to the EPA we give it to the federal reserve and also I just should say one group that gets a ton of power under this situation is the incumbents who are benefiting I don't mean congressional I mean if you are a beneficiary of a program that is on autopilot growth Medicare is a very good example is kind of programmed tax expenditures are good the mortgage interest deduction is a good example if you're a beneficiary of a program that doesn't need congressional reauthorize it every couple of years and decide how much money it's gonna get you're actually doing pretty well from this frankly this is not eventually you're not gonna be doing well cuz your programs gonna run out of money but at the moment you're one of the winners so your question of how long till we get radical procedural reforms short of fascism I'm not optimistic particularly um you know we have we've done an enormous amount of a form of Congress over the twentieth century I mean you saw where we change a filibuster a bunch of times people don't realize this but the house was originally the body of Congress that had something like the filibuster which in the Senate they didn't have anything like the filibuster and a house is where things went to die and there was a condom just blanking out his name there was a good bar could be just written of him anyway an early speaker who eventually just what they said nope no more we're done and just ended essentially all those minority protections or all those ways of delay and impeding could we get to that point yeah maybe but I don't think we're going there anytime soon because the problem is is that there tends to be a critical of folks who will scream louder than the winners will for any of these big changes and that just makes it difficult now you can go too far by sort of logically laying out all the ways the system doesn't work there's a line from I think I think I've heard Larry Summers said actually that America is continually on governor bowl but yet it keeps being governed there's something to that we do 'quite you know we did pass the Affordable Care Act which I disagree with the gentleman I think it's a very very good bill and we did pass a fair amount of stimulus much more than we had in the past and maybe it wasn't as much as some Democrats that wanted or thought we needed but it was better than nothing so we do get things going just the problem is that I would say the sort of counter that optimism is we were in a generationally uncommon moment for action I mean the largest majority single party majority since the 1970s a financial crisis a popular new president and what we got done punted on ton of the hard decisions very very ugly process basically made people hate anything related to the government so it wasn't as we go forward here I think we're seeing real possibilities that maybe not this time but what if in a couple times we do screw up the debt ceiling and we don't get it done well I mean the long-term fiscal consequences of that are almost a calculable for this country but it really could happen I mean you really don't want to have a it is not considered a particularly controversial statement to say bad management can ruin a company and it isn't because a management wants a company ruined and it shouldn't be considered a particularly odd statement to say about America that bad management or processes that don't function very well can really cause serious harm in the long run and maybe once it does cause that serious harm will get serious about fixing some of it but it would sure as hell be better to do it on the front end instead of the back end is you're a big fan thank you so I admire your fairness but I really have to ask and I guess this is a partisan question I mean isn't the problem here Republicans and the modern Republican Party you keep talking about politicians who are interested in policy they are invariably Democrats the Democratic Party having the legacy of the New Deal right and the Great Society clearly the Democratic Party is interested in passing effective policy that will really truly make people's lives better which is why I agree with you wholeheartedly about the Affordable Care Act Republicans seem from my perspective especially now to be nihilists that they're their only legacy is now reaganism right which is the systematic dismantling of a government that passes policy right that that's as interested in policy and I say this also as a native Californian who couldn't remember California before proposition 13 and before you know somebody like Grover Norquist you know took the proposition 13 ball and ran with it at a national level so I mean you don't have to say yes you're right Republicans are the problem but I mean but clearly clearly they are what is standing in the way of policy there's certainly what's staying away of democratic policy but do something you know look the question of whether or not Republicans are diseased are genetically diseased mutants who just hate the government and want ever and want poor people to die I think that if you look in sort of recent years one thing right now that is an issue I mean god I would love I am as you say like I it would be let's just put this way it'd be great for my career to be able to partner up with the Republicans on a couple policy measures it would look great and I would love to do it i I've you know I did a lot of interviews of Paul Ryan back before he released a budget they didn't make any sense in which I you know I didn't like his roadmap particularly but you know it was a serious policy document I was willing to have the argument the party out of power is very frequently a less impressive policy machine than the party in power the burden of being in the white and of actually having to pass policy I think does force you to take it more seriously the Bush years were not bereft of policy that you know people can disagree on it but was were real attempts to solve problems the Medicare prescription drug benefit wasn't structured how I'd like but it wasn't it I mean for Karl Rove it appeared to be an attempt to solve a political problem which is seniors don't vote Republican but it also did solve the problem of seniors don't have drugs No Child Left Behind I actually think certainly needs reforms and and had its flaws but was a step in the right direction the Republican Party on taxes has gone a little insane I think of that there's essentially no real argument I'd like to I just did a post the other day which I talked to mr. samwick and allowed there to be more argument but my personal view is the Republican Party's current position which is that any and all tax increases at any time ever are to be opposed and that it is better to oppose tax increases and not get a budget deficit deal than to have say thirty percent of the deal be tax increases in seventy percent be spending cuts is to me mind-boggling so I think on taxes they're particularly irresponsible and in a particularly irresponsible moment that has been lasting for particularly a long time that's been going on since about Reagan and George HW Bush did trying to bucket and he paid very dearly for it but on other things I think that there are a lot of that if you had a you know a Mitt Romney government or a John McCain government I think you would have seen serious efforts of policy so do I think Republicans have been somewhat more irresponsible in recent years and Democrats were early in the Bush years I think so I think it's a very I think it is worth looking at two examples on that the Bush tax cuts in 2001 had a lot of Democratic Co support you know in part that's because tax cuts are popular but that was a pretty Republican policy and you know they a lot of them said look this is a new precedent you got elected sort of and we're gonna stick with them on it when Obama came in into the stimulus bill and note that Republicans were pushing a fairly large not quite that large but uh if I remember correctly a five hundred billion dollar payroll tax cut stimulus maybe four hundred billion dollars it was significant now one Republican voted for the stimulus bill I mean Obama had just come in it was a very big election usually you have what we call the honeymoon period where they give the guy a little bit of the benefit of the doubt and there was no crossover on that whatsoever and I think that was very peculiar and then if you compare sort of the Medicare prescription drug benefit which was not designed the way Democrats wanted it to be designed but a number of them did crossover to to go with it because it was the case it Republicans are making concessions towards him in terms of you know you were adding a drug benefit to Medicare which again you didn't see in the health care debate where Republicans knew that a lot of the ideas in this bill had come from them I mean it was very similar to what Mitt Romney did very similar to what Republicans have proposed in the early 90s but there was no bipartisan support for it whatsoever I think there has been a superior capacity to enforce party unity on the Republican side and that's a problem but if you look at graphs of how the two parties are behaving the fact is they're more similar than different that filibuster graph graphs of party unity graphs of polarization the two parties even if Republicans are moving are moving further right than Democrats are moving left even if a filibustering more than Democrats are even if sometimes they appear to have more party discipline the Democrats do they are not they're both sort of moving along the same trend line and so again I think you have to look at it and say well what are the structural forces that are creating the underlying trend as opposed to this group of people as opposed to putting hanging too much on the on the individuals or even on the parties because again when they look more similar than different you have to ask what's making them still what's making them similar it's probably going to end up being a more fruitful question than what continues to make them different sure oh no it's for him you know you're not gonna get to ask a question yeah sorry Tom I don't so I feel like we're kind of getting stuck in a a pit of despair here what with me yeah it's it tends to be the problem in conversation like this so I want to see if we can think a little more kind of forward directionally I liked your story about incentives because when I think about why things are the way they are I think of them as now you had a story about incentives the incentive the incentive to the minority party is to D throw in the majority now I would tweak that a little bit and say that the incentive of any elected politician is to get reelected and I feel like to me that's the core of the incentives problem so my best guess at thinking forward ly about this is how do we change the way the term limits are structured and how do we change the way that campaigns are financed now being that these changes need legislators to change these things it's a pretty tough problem so what's your best guess and what is the Washington Post best guess as to how we do this well you'll have to ask the Washington Post about this I'm not speaking for them term limits term limits are an intuitively really good idea that turn out to be a disaster in practice and here's the reason and we have in California by the way didn't work and in Florida is my understanding anyway but if you ask a public a scientist about term limits what they will tell you is this and it goes to your campaign finance question term limits empower the permanent government they empower lobbyists and power staff they empower everybody who isn't democratically elected because the people who are democratically elected don't have time to build up a expertise B familiarity with the actual workings of the job and see the sort of popularity structure where they can make riskier decisions so when you have term limits and I mean in California there was a sort of I just I remember a couple years ago reading about a budget negotiated with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the leadership of the two parties in the House and Senate the assembly and Senate and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the most experienced politician in the room Arnold babymama Schwarzenegger was the most experienced politician in the room and like I'm not super old you might be able to tell but I can do the thing where I can say I remember when it was a joke that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be like working out the budget details in California so you have to be careful term limits because you end up sort of empowering the wrong people much like it's trying to break down the filibuster has in certain weird ways which we can get into although I don't think are so important for the story actually broken down the norms that kept people from using it term limits end up bringing a lot of polarization and a lot of you know people who don't know what they're doing and they emphasize a lot of systems problems as opposed to ameliorating them campaign finance reform you know Godspeed I'd love to see it and you know the Supreme Court has certainly made it harder not just with Citizens United but with the sort of the the Vallejo decisions where they decided that spending money election with speech and thought it was very very difficult to regulate but you could do something where you did something like the fair elections now act which instead of trying to make large donors less powerful tries to make small donors more powerful so if you donate 200 bucks maybe you get a four to one match so it's much easier for a politician to run a campaign relying on many many small donors as opposed to only a few large donors and obviously there can be public funding elements in that so I'd love to see that happen with that take care of this I don't really think so actually I think that the party tends to want to get the party re-elected I wouldn't say it's about individuals as much as you would I think that if you look at the behavior of politicians who are retiring what they do is they try to get their successor elected and there are many reasons for that one of the some of the reasons are they really care about their party they like their friends in the in the house of the Senate some are maybe they want to go work for public and leaning policy shop and they or a lobbying shop even and they need to continue having access to the people they were closed with before and if they screw their party over on the way out the door it ain't gonna happen so it isn't clear that the sort of retiring politician ends up being much more of a Profile in Courage than the politician running for re-election in some ways they look much more similar than they do different so when it comes to sort of forward-looking when it comes to pulling us out of the pit of despair that I have dug there's a good New York Times Book Review piece not long ago and it talked about the problem with the last chapter of nonfiction books where they try to offer all these lame sounding solutions to all these like intractable problems it'd be good if we solve some stuff but like if I knew how to do it and you know getting rid of the filibuster yeah it's funny it strikes people as a radical idea but majority voting and every other sphere of their life and every other country and everything else doesn't nobody thinks oh well we really you know if we had a 60% threshold to elect people like most of our representatives would not be in office we would have it essentially an empty Congress which I guess would be interesting maybe the people left would be better Oh actually they'd be more polarized because it'd be from very very highly partisan districts but I would say we should get rid of that and then at least at the times when the because remember you would still have the check of divided government so if there if the people had elected a different House and Senate that would stop people that would stop would it matter if you could be felt if you didn't have a filibuster and you till the check of public opinion because you want to keep being in power but at least when the American people delivered a really strong result in your favor and said we want you to govern we want you to solve these problems we are upset with how things are going you'd be able to do it as opposed to simply upset them more but how to get from here to there I'm just a blogger your data on culture went back to the 90th Congress very impressive something there I mean it's one of the frustrations let's go back to it and look at it more closely oh yeah I sort of can you know the thing about it is that it's definitely there and it definitely does spike and I guess in that one Congress despite dramatically although then it comes back down for a little while but it just sort of isn't clear how dramatic it actually was I mean it's funny because we don't think of what's going on right now is being not dramatic and we are what you know four or five times what it was that year one of the things that happened around this period though which I didn't get in because it's sort of complicated is that I believe it was Robert Byrd who created what's called the dual tracking system where it used to be that if you're filibustering something everything in the Senate stopped you were holding everything up and nothing got done he created dual tracking we could filibuster something they would put it away for a while come back to it later so the cost of filibustering became smaller you weren't holding everything up everybody wasn't furious at you it made it much easier to filibuster a small bill because nobody really cared if they didn't care about that bill that much you weren't keeping them from getting tomorrow's thing done I mean there are ways in which it just wastes time one way or the other but they're not as big of a deal so there isn't however really a great dramatic story where in you know there's a secret there's a meeting and in that meeting Gerald Ford and says you know what we're gonna do now is it doesn't seem to have really happened the big spikes that come in the 90s appear to have had to do with Gingrich and Dole working together that there was a very very articulated strategy around keeping the majority from being able to govern which was very a new at that point and then the big spike in the 1/10 is after Obama gets elected in the 111th brother but I wish I could tell you about a story than that but I just don't have one and nor do the political scientist as far as I can tell it seems to have been that people realized you could do this and then they really begin doing it I mean it's sort of you know like what a monkey learns she's a stick then it uses to stick a lot yes monkeys fish sticks the filibuster the stick also became just the threat of a filibuster that people would run from the threat without actually carrying it through so I don't know about the timing of that but certainly in the last you know four to eight years the response to simply the threat of a filibuster has become large I think the filibuster in and of itself from my understanding of it I'm not a political scientist but it makes good sense to have that ability for the minority to gunk things up sometimes but when simply the threat I will filibuster if you don't give me this I wish somebody would say well then go filibuster do it and actually see somebody pull it off but I sorry well I had a different question the the gunking up that you mentioned earlier you said that for some people it does work and you mentioned Medicare beneficiaries and homeowners but I would think to have the gridlock that we have it must this this must be working for more people and I was hoping that you might comment on who you see the current situation working for and compare that to the people who vote I think the people who tend to vote most the system as gunked-up as it is does work while the people who are being harmed by the current situation the most excuse me don't vote so much I'd say the people does work for beyond who I mentioned is the minority the minority at any given time is pretty big in a two-party system so it no but I mean everybody beneath them I mean the people who support the minority the the minority party in this country i I know what you want me to say here's it works for the rich and maybe to some degree it does maybe it's somebody they just need less from the government I mean the rich certainly do better under the political system than other people do but I don't I don't think that the filibuster on thing will terrific the filibuster is keeping us from you know whatever extending unemployment benefits slightly I don't think that's sort of how it I don't think it's really how it breaks down I don't think the operative pressures on the filibuster are break down along income demographics the only thing I'd say on the gunking up issue is if people underestimate the pressure of time in the US Senate how much needs to get done how many appropriation bills how much must pass legislation there is the reason that the minority can simply threaten to filibuster and the majority often runs from it is simply because they the majority understands that if they don't get these other things done and the minority ascends it's to that horrible things will happen for them they won't be able to pass other bills that other constituencies want so they'll disappoint those constituencies and they won't pass appropriations bills and so the government will shut down there's just an enormous amount of they won't be able to pass judges and so they'll have lost the opportunity to confirm a bunch of district and appellate court judges this tends to be a big deal for them and it just for them to have a to let the minority filibuster when nobody cares and it'll have no different outcome they're just there's no benefit in them for it I'm just sort of wondering about like other representative democracies like do we see these same problems like how uniquely American is this broken system I mean Gazoo we look at gridlock all the time we'd look at party politics sort of gay in the way we look at like fighting against whatever is in power you know that's like that's so like definitive almost of like politics we sort of think of it so how unique are some of these problems or what you think is this is pretty unique no I mean none of the other advanced democracies work like that I'll just make one point on this because the upon you to somebody who does more international comparative stuff than I do but you hear a lot of talk about how America is a center-right nation and usually that talk is saying something like or was saying something like well Europe has you know all these social benefits and they have health care you know single-payer health care systems and blah blah blah and we don't okay the reason you're up has a lot of those things is somebody got elected on that platform and passed it and it wasn't that big of a deal I mean it was a big deal on policy terms but they just did it in America we'd had like eight presidents run in parter and full and universal health care platforms before I mean Nixon had had one and Truman had had one and you know a bunch of them it had them but they were never able to do it so we have this institutional outcome which is small see conservative in that it favors the status quo and we have and then we look at that and we look at what the country looks like because of that and assume that what we're seeing is a ideological outcome because the country has certain opinions but we don't seem to like Medicare any less in people like in Canada like their health care system but we like actually a lot less than they do is our private health care system but we just haven't been able to muster the activation energy to get it to move and without that energy we end up having outcomes that make us look like a very different country even though I'm just not sure that if we'd had all the same things but the British political system I think we'd have a very different looking state today maybe better maybe worse depending on your perspective but definitely different well he'd have a single-payer health care system for one thing and I mean that would be different a lot of measures so in other systems what happens usually is that the in parliamentary systems you elect somebody and that person comes out of the majority party and that the Prime Minister comes out of majority party and he controls with much much tighter party discipline than we have in this country frankly the party majority beneath him or the party coalition beneath him and they pass legislation I mean England is a good example of this where they elected a Cameron and immediately passed this gigantic really gigantic deficit reduction bill or austerity bill you mean like that bill or not like it but it had like a carbon tax and an increase in taxes in the rich and huge cuts in spending and it just they just did it I mean I remember I emailed a friend of mine who works for the was it for the for the Financial Times out there and he's I said to him you know is this thing gonna gonna work is it gonna happen and he said well I don't know you know some people think I said he does work some people don't think it works you know we'll have to see and I said no no I mean we'll pass and he said oh of course it'll pass I mean they've won the election yeah I think this sort of feeds into this now but is the two-party system inherently untenable and and is there any opportunity for a viable third party that isn't just a spoiler I think my answers are no one no I think the two-party system is perfectly tenable or at least has worked for a while on the pod continue working and or semi working or whatever we do with it and I don't see much of an opportunity for a third party I would like your I would like reaction to something it seems to me that it isn't what they are doing to us democracy's messy and it's dependent on something bubbling up from an informed group of people with some amount of goodwill and part of it is a lack of civic education it which we don't seem to have time for anymore or whatever are the interest in doing and the the other thing I watched Freedom Riders last night and one of the most poignant moments was a twelve-year-old girl whose parents owned a grocery store and they were part of the mob ready to attack or tear apart the Freedom Riders of you know races and colors that just they were ready for blood but this 12 year old girl saw people being stomped upon and gassed and so forth and not able to breathe and she spontaneously brought out water and went from person to person trying to stabilize them I'm sure she had to face the wrath of her parents and her neighbors after that but and I'm saying this because for instance we had Joe McCarthy who were that was prepped that was a crisis similar to some of the crises we have now in government but in part it was individuals that rallied other people around them democracy can't work just from the top down what do you think about that I think that any vision of democracy that relies too much on a highly highly highly engaged population because most people just don't want to pay that much attention to politics and shouldn't have to frankly or whether or not you think they should have to they just probably aren't going to so we've got to figure out some something else or personal acts of heroism so just doesn't just doesn't seem to sort of happen you know in some countries you know they have compulsory voting so they have more voting but it's not clear they have a more engaged public than we do and you know we're human beings we seem to just sort of muddle along I always had a better answer for you than that I'd like to say well yes I mean we we need a much more informed citizenry and and we'll get that through X Y & Z but I'm not sure we do and I don't think we will I think that what would be good is if the way is if the political system worked better for the way people actually in the real world made their decisions but a lot of the times in this conversation another thing people say oh as well look the filibuster isn't the problem or whatever isn't the problem it's polarization it's a problem it's being so far apart maybe that would be that would probably fix it too if everybody agreed but or decided they would stop at least trying to heighten disagreement but we know how to change rules we don't really know how to change large groups of people and so any solution where you need to change the sort of like the political souls of large groups of people I think is a solution that won't work I think this might be the last one look at the time just just a quick quick few words on Bernie Sanders and the speech in chief interesting semi filibustered it wasn't technically a filibuster Bernie Sanders is a very smart guy I think he's a good senator I thought a lot of parts of speech were what I saw of it were it was good I don't really have a very deep feeling on that speech right now that I thought it was good of him to do it but that's the type of thing you don't really see which is it people taking the opportunity of these protections to go out and really try to present an argument in reality there was pretty much very few senators on the floor when Sanders spoke and it's only because it became a media event David even knows about it I mean this idea that we protect abate in the Senate that the way the Senators really come to understand what's going on is if they listen to these three minute speeches from one another as a joke I mean it would be a horrible way to run democracy I'm glad they don't they like talk to experts and they have staffers and they talk to one another behind closed doors and they have long meetings like the idea that it should be well you know that Kent Conrad comes to for three charts and now Judd Gregg is supposed to change his mind is I it'd be a very very weird way to make up your mind on major pieces of complicated legislation anyway thank you all for coming out and thank you

Channel: Dartmouth

Views: 7,053

Rating: 3.8499999 out of 5

Keywords: Dartmouth College, Rockefeller Center, Public Policy, Ezra Klein, Washington Post, MSNBC, Washington, D.C.

Id: fOuTPb4iAro

Length: 86min 16sec (5176 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2011