“ [T]he US Congress has demonstrated clearly that it can’t be trusted to govern the country in a responsible manner. And the tail-risk implications for markets are huge. … When you build up large stocks of mistrust and ill will, nothing can happen for a very long time. But when something does happen, it’s much quicker and much worse than anybody could have anticipated. The markets might not be punishing the US government at the moment. But the mistrust and ill will is there, believe me. And when it appears, it will appear with a vengeance.”
— Felix Salmon
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Posts tagged with congress
“ Congress is a substitute for violence. When you go around the world, they kill each other. Here we go down to the floor and argue with each other.”
— Dick Gephardt as quoted by Steve Elmendorf
Bill Clinton, Motivational Speaker
Bill Clinton to House Minority Leader, Dick Gephardt in a conference call to Democratic congressional leaders early in the 1995 budget and debt ceiling debate that would lead to two government shutdowns:
Just be of good cheer. … Just go out there and debate these things and tell them what we believe in, and it will all work out.
“ I bet most Republicans care more about taxes than they do about deficits, just as most Democrats care more about health and welfare programs more than they do about deficits. Debt limits force the parties to consider a second-order priority, which, I agree, is a worthy purpose. That they can be forced to make serious concessions on the first-order priorities to agree to a plan on a second-order priority is yet to be seen.”
— Steve Smith (presumably) in the comments at the Monkey Cage
Representation as Telemarketing
Political Wire:
Rep. Tim Johnson (R-IL) is trying to personally call all 300,000 households in his congressional district, the Washington Post reports.
Talk about someone who would benefit from a little social media.
Tweeting from Below the Beltway
The Hill (via Political Wire) reports that politicians are holding back their twitters in response to Anthony Weiner’s social media disaster:
The day Weiner held his press conference when he admitted he lied about being hacked, there was a noticeable decline in tweets by Democratic lawmakers. On Monday, June 6, only 120 Democrats tweeted. That’s about 30 percent less than what they tweeted two Mondays before. On the Republican side, 338 tweeted the Monday of Weiner’s presser, about an 18 percent drop from two weeks before.
Totally irrational behavior. Why would a member of Congress feel the need to pinch the flow if they weren’t sending cock shots?
Twitter is getting a ton of attention right now, and after constituents are done looking for lewd trails on Weiner’s Twitter page, some of them might search for their own representatives offerings. This is an opportunity to impress voters with high quality (and cock shot-free) tweeting.
It’s pure Fenno 2.0.
Yeah, I went there. Deal with it nerd.
Responsible Implies a Predicable Partisanship
Seth Masket on ideological extremity in congressional policy making:
The fact that we have parties that actually seek to deliver on campaign promises is something we should be celebrating.
Not So Suicidal
Matt Yglesias on the cohesion of congressional Republicans on the Ryan budget plan and Medicare reform:
One of the unfortunate things about the political media’s commitment to “balanced” coverage is that not only do reporters generally feel impelled to always act as if the two parties are normatively symmetrical there also seems to be a reluctance to explore the systematic asymmetries between the parties in an even merely descriptive sense. As a result, we know less about the differences in these disciplinary dynamics, their sources, and their implications than we really ought to.
This is a nice point.
But I don’t think his specific question of why the GOP would take such a knowingly unpopular position is any great mystery. Pundits are trying to make forecasts for this Medicare vote by using the Democrats experience with ACA as an analogy (on this see Seth Masket and Steven Greene who calculate that a vote cast for the healthcare reform cost Democrats 6-8 points in the 2010 midterm elections). But that’s not a great comparison because ACA passed. Republicans knew that the Ryan plan would not pass. And it is going to be really hard to whip up foment in the electorate over a discordant vote on a bill that died in the Senate.
You don’t get loss aversion without some tangible change.
“ People hate democracy. They like democracy in the stylized version they have in their heads, which involves everyone in the country agreeing with them. They don’t like it in practice because, well, it’s messy, and it turns out people disagree with them.”
— Matt Jarvis, in the comments to a Jonathan Bernstein blog post
The Democrats Misallocated Resources
Ezra Klein on Peter Orzag and the Obama administration’s shuffling of the troops:
But the Obama administration did a lot of that kind of thing when they took office. Although you could’ve made a case for Orszag at OMB, as there was obvious value in having a budget director who understood CBO, it was harder to explain why the White House named Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, Colorado’s Ken Salazar and Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius to Cabinet posts given that they were the most popular Democrats in states where a Senate seat was in-cycle in 2010. The Obama administration tried to hire “the best people for the job,” but it gave short shrift to the consequences of taking those people out of the jobs they were already holding and races they were considering/could be cajoled into entering.
