misguided liberal positions

I am getting rather prolific with these posts.

Frank Rich has a column in the New York Times today in which he points out that after the recent election, the number of people in an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll who thought the US was "on the right track" improved a whopping one percentage point, from 31 to 32 percent, suggesting that the election did little to change people's view of the government. He gives passing notice to the problems of the filibuster in the Senate, but his primary explanation of this persistent dissatisfaction is the role of "big money that dominates our political system, regardless of who's in power." At this point he loses me. Money has been a factor in our political system forever, and attempts to erase its influence have been futile. We have tried over the last hundred years with little or no success. Perhaps it is time to consider that money as such is not the locus of the problem.

Rich's comparison of the Great Depression with the present "Great Recession" shows this. He claims that in the Depression there were "major reforms in American government and business", whereas this time there have not been changes. He forgets to mention that in the Great Depression what was different was not the presence or absence of big money; it was the presence of a temporarily effective government, by virtue of the overwhelming partisan Democratic majority.

This relates to the other liberal shibboleth expressed today in a column by David Broder in the Washington Post, the idea that if we only had bipartisan agreements we would be able to do the things we need to do. Unfortunately our President believes in the chimera of bipartisanship. I would suggest that the decline in his popularity is precisely because he has tried so hard to be bipartisan. The people want the government to govern, to get things done. Bipartisanship is at best only a means to that end, and in fact a counterproductive and illusory means.

Both of these liberal positions, that it is money that is at fault, and that we should all be bipartisan, constitute in reality the willful disregard of the real problem, the structure of our government itself. Rich alludes to it, only to ignore it. The structure of our government forces bipartisan politics and the resulting gridlock. We need to eliminate or subordinate the Senate.

The Senate

As my thinking has developed, I have concluded that the essential change that needs to be made in the government is to subordinate the Senate to the House. This may sound like an impossible change, but I do not think so. In fact I find support for the change in the Constitution, of all places. The Constitution specifies, in Article I, Section 7, that "All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives: but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills."

I interpret this to mean that for the Founders the role of the Senate in the legislature was intended to be only to accept bills sent to it from the House, or to suggest amendments to the bills. In fact this was the way the Senate operated at the beginning of the government, until about 1809. It turned out that the Senate actually did not have much to do.

This changed, quite without any reference to the Constitution or the intent of the Founders, when the Senate asserted that it was the equal of the House, just as representative of the people, and just as able to initiate legislation. The Senate "reconstituted" itself between 1809 and 1829, and became the Senate we have today. This change occurred without any legislation, as a result of changes in the internal rules and procedures of the Senate, that the House accepted.

It is my position that the House can just as easily decide to no longer accept the changes the Senate claimed in 1809-1829. It could do so by making it a House rule that it will no longer accept legislation initiated by the Senate. Bills passed by the House would be sent to the Senate for their acceptance or proposed amendments, with a time limit for the response of the Senate.

If the Senate does nothing in that time limit, the House would assume that the Senate approves of the bill. If the Senate suggests amendments, the House would consider and accept or reject the amendments, and then would consider the bill passed as amended, and it would be sent to the President. The Senate would return to being the clearly subordinate part of the legislature, and the House would be in control.

The likelihood of the House making such a move at present is almost nil, but if it were to become a topic of serious discussion, its possibility might increase.

Reforming campaign finance

In response to Phil, it is my feeling that trying to restrict individuals or entities such as business or labor from directing money to the party they support has been counterproductive and futile. The history of campaign finance laws shows that the result is only that lawyers find ways around the laws, just as they do with taxes, and the sources of money only become more opaque. I would get rid of the laws restricting corporate and union contributions to parties entirely. On the other hand I do support restrictions on contributions to individual candidates. I would make it a law that all contributions to political campaigns must be funneled through the party organizations. No individual candidate could solicit or accept direct contributions from anyone. This would be considered bribery. Besides making the laws simpler and easier to enforce, I would expect that the party organizations would be able to buffer the influence of individual contributions. Contributors are always going to want to influence the direction of legislation--this is appropriate and proper--but they should be able to do so only through a party, which has to coordinate the entire range of interests of all the contributors.

Raising the debt limit

Today Paul Krugman wrote a column commenting on former Senator Alan Simpson's comment that there will be blood in the streets next April when the federal debt limit will have to be raised again. Simpson, the co chair of the President's deficit commission, seems to believe that the Republicans will make a fuss over raising the debt, even threatening to shut down the government without concessions from Obama.

My position is that whoever has the majority in the House should be able to do what it wants. My hope is that when the Republicans get to that point in April, they will be responsible and do the right thing. If they are completely irresponsible and bring down the government, though, to me this is because with our present government structure they are allowed to be irresponsible, relying on the rest of the government to correct their childishness. If the majority in the House were clearly in charge, without the Senate and the President to correct their irresponsible behavior, they would not be so childish. It is not something inherent in the members of the House that makes them irresponsible: it is the way our government is set up. Our present structure encourages irresponsible behavior.

Of course I do not agree with the Republican programs, but they are in the majority, and should be able to realize their goals.

Gridlock

Ir is interesting to note that we have been complaining for the last two years about the filibuster or threat of filibuster that has thwarted and delayed legislation desired by the majority in the Senate and the House. With the election of a majority in the House of Republicans, but maintaining the majority in the Senate of Democrats, the situation changes. With the majority in the Senate, the Democrats are in a position to reject and prevent legislation passed by the majority in the House without using the threat of filibuster, and there is nothing the minority in the Senate can do about it. Thus it is likely that there will be much less use of the filibuster for at least the next two years--unless the Senate minority can gain enough votes from Democrats to force the majority to appeal to the filibuster as a way to prevent adoption of the minority position. But again even if the majority is forced to do so, there is little the minority can do to stop it.

This was the situation for much of the later 1800s, with the Republicans in the majority in the Senate, and thus able to prevent legislation coming from the House it did not like, whether it came from their own party or the opposition party. Political paralysis and gridlock does not entirely depend on the use of the filibuster.

Political Parties

If what Hacker and Pierson say in their book is true, then the problem with political parties is not that they are weak, as I had concluded: it is that the Democratic Party is weak. The Republicans are well organized, well disciplined, and have been able to accomplish their goals quite well even when the President is a Democrat. For them politics is a form of war. For the Democrats politics is a process of compromise and gaining consensus. This only allows the Republicans to manipulate the Democrats into doing their bidding. The Democrats have become, because of the demand for money to conduct campaigns, in effect Republican wannabees, trying to please the wealthy. Dick Armey is quoted as saying that his guiding principle in politics is to never offend your base. Unfortunately this is just what the Democrats have done, offend their base of middle class voters. Democrats need to get well enough organized, and make strong connections with their base, middle class voters, to stand on their own without needing to appeal to the enemy, the wealthy.

In the meantime, the structural change needed in the government is to eliminate the obstructive power of the Senate by reinstituting the parliamentary rule that allows members of the Senate to call for the question, thus stopping debate, and forcing a vote on the matter under discussion.

Inequality again

I have just finished reading Winner Take All Politics by Hacker and Pierson that I mentioned in a previous post. It is a devastating account of what has allowed the steep increase in inequality in our country. Their analysis is that the extent of inequality in our society is not just an economic phenomena: it is the direct result of the dominance of business, in particular the financial industry, over the government. Their dominance over the last thirty years has allowed business, through active legislation and passive drift, to enrich itself at the cost of stagnation and decline in the incomes of the middle class. I encourage everyone reading this post to immediately get the book and read it.

Unfortunately their account of these thirty years and the dynamics involved make efforts to change the system more difficult, and I am going to have to rethink the rather optimistic suggestions I made about changing the system. It is not just that the political parties in general need to get organized: the Republicans have been doing this quite well. It is rather that the Democratic party, or whatever successor there is to it, has to get organized so that it can function as a counterweight to business, and this will be very difficult, because business is where the money is.