Posts Tagged ‘ filibuster ’

What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Over the last few weeks, a new narrative has taken hold in health care news: that of a partisan Democratic Party determined to “ram” a bill through Congress. It’s a frame that the GOP has been relentless and disciplined in perpetuating. Some have even taken to calling it the “nuclear option,” which in its previous political incarnation was the name Trent Lott gave the Republican effort in 2005 to change filibuster rules for judicial nominations.

The “nuclear option” as shorthand for budget reconciliation is not only a misnomer, it’s flat-out misleading. Hardly unprecedented, budget reconciliation has been used 22 times since the process was established in 1974. As Jackie Calmes wrote in the New York Times last week, 16 of those times, it was the Republican Party that used it to “ram legislation through on a one-party vote” (at least that’s how House GOP Leader John Boehner describes its use today).

Moreover, reconciliation has been used several times to pass health care legislation. NPR’s Julie Rovner, who has done superb work on the health care story, pointed out that health care provisions ranging from COBRA (it even says so in the name — COBRA stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to changes in Medicare and Medicaid have come via reconciliation.

But efforts by reporters like Rovner notwithstanding, the Democrats have already lost this battle as the media have taken the GOP’s cue and fixated on process. The unwarranted magnification of reconciliation is not unlike the media frenzy over Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” a bit of horse-trading that was hardly unusual in writing bills, but somehow became the equivalent of a legislative high crime by the time the GOP and the media were done with it.

More than any other piece of legislation in recent memory, health care reform has been debated, negotiated, and written under the unforgiving attention of the 24-hour cycle. This is as close a view as the American public has had to the sausage-making in Washington. They don’t like what they see. Republicans are well aware of this, and continue to point the spotlight on the frequently ugly process.

And so we are now at the current pass. One party has made unprecedented use of the filibuster to prevent anything from being done. The other party is now thinking of using a procedural tactic used nearly two dozen times since 1980, including to pass health care legislation, to break the impasse. While there certainly has been more attention on the abuse of the filibuster of late, that the use of reconciliation is even a story is a problem for Democrats. That Democrats are playing defense on a matter of process speaks volumes about their PR ineptitude, the Republicans’ messaging cohesion, and the media’s ongoing failure to go beyond stenography.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 1 Comment »

GOP Complaints on Health Care Process Ring Hollow

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Republicans are warning of ominous political consequences if the Democrats use budget reconciliation rules to help pass health care reform. It would be “a huge mistake,” averred Sen. Olympia Snowe, the chief object of Senate Democrats’ unconsummated quest for bipartisan cooperation on health reform.

Evidently, for the Democrats to resort to reconciliation would be an intolerable abuse of congressional rules, whereas the Republican habit of filibustering everything in sight is perfectly within bounds. Passing health measures by a simple majority vote, the GOP maintains, would be the political equivalent of nuclear war: It would pulverize what little remains of comity and good will in Washington.

It’s a little late for the GOP to be worrying about that. Nor are Republicans more convincing when they complain that it’s somehow illegitimate for President Obama to start the bidding in tomorrow’s health care summit with a plan derived from bills that have passed both houses of Congress.

“I don’t think the people like this any more than…the approach that came down the pike earlier,” House Republican Whip Eric Cantor said. “People are incredulous. I just think they are wondering, does the White House not get it?” He was referring, of course, to polls showing majority opposition to the main health care proposals before Congress.

Cantor seems to be arguing that shifting public attitudes matter more than election results, and that Congress shouldn’t pass legislation that doesn’t poll well. Does the House minority whip not get representative democracy? (It was a good thing he wasn’t around when Lincoln pushed Congress to enact a draft to win the Civil War.) And if Republicans really are so sure Democrats will self-destruct politically by passing Obamacare, why not lash them on?

One reason might be that the health care summit will highlight the embarrassing fact that Cantor and company offer no serious alternative to the president’s approach. (House Republicans last year labored mightily to produce a mouse of a bill that would cover just three million of America’s 40-plus million uninsured.) The real choice is between the president’s far-from-perfect health care reform, and none at all.

And in a way that’s too bad, because if we had a serious opposition, it might help the president push back against some of the bad ideas coming from his own party. An example: under pressure from labor and liberals, Obama has drastically scaled down and delayed an excise tax on expensive employer-paid health plans. Not only does that reduce revenue needed to pay for health reform, it also barely grazes an open-ended federal tax subsidy that economists believe contributes greatly to medical cost inflation. Rather than insist on limiting that government subsidy, many Republicans claim it’s a violation of Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.

In a similar vein, the Republicans have lambasted Obama’s proposal to cut hundreds of billions from Medicare to defray the expenses of expanding coverage. And so in its blindly partisan attacks on Obama’s push for health reform, the GOP has managed to 1) shred its credibility as a force for fiscal responsibility; 2) thwart efforts to rein in runaway health care costs; and 3) reinforce their well-deserved reputation as a party that measures compassion by the thimble-full.

On health care, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of demagoguery – which is why their complaints about parliamentary foul play ring hollow.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fiscal Responsibility, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 2 Comments »

Bayh: Filibuster Must Be Reformed

Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

Last week, Evan Bayh came under fire from some progressives for leaving the Senate and likely handing his seat to a Republican in conservative Indiana. But this weekend, some of those same critics have some kinder words for the Indiana senator.

Bayh wrote a lengthy op-ed for the New York Times taking on a subject that’s been very much on the minds of Democrats these days: the filibuster. After offering some suggestions to improve cross-party relations, he presents some concrete proposals to end the abuse of filibusters:

For this reason, filibusters should require 35 senators to sign a public petition and make a commitment to continually debate an issue in reality, not just in theory. Those who obstruct the Senate should pay a price in public notoriety and physical exhaustion. That would lead to a significant decline in frivolous filibusters.

Filibusters should also be limited to no more than one for any piece of legislation. Currently, the decision to begin debate on a bill can be filibustered, followed by another filibuster on each amendment, followed by yet another filibuster before a final vote. This leads to multiple legislative delays and effectively grinds the Senate to a halt.

What’s more, the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster should be reduced to 55 from 60. During my father’s era, filibusters were commonly used to block civil rights legislation and, in 1975, the requisite number of votes was reduced to 60 from 67. The challenges facing the country today are so substantial that further delay imperils the Republic and warrants another reduction in the supermajority requirement.

These are good ideas. Having sat in the Senate for 11 years now, Bayh has had a courtside view of the transformation of the filibuster into a tool for obstructing routine business by a minority party determined to grind government to a halt. As the chart below (from Norm Ornstein) demonstrates, the number of cloture motions to end filibusters took a dramatic jump in the 110th Congress:

Keep in mind: that chart only goes up to the end of the previous Congress. Updated through this one, it won’t look much better.

When Bayh announced his retirement, there was some skepticism about his stated reason for leaving, which he said was an increasingly dysfunctional Senate that prevented public problems from being solved. If you care so much, some said (with justification), why don’t you stay there and fix it? Well, it seems Bayh was, in fact, serious about his concerns. And now, it looks like he’s using the attention that his retirement has attracted to shine a spotlight on a procedural tactic that’s impeding our government’s ability to govern. If he keeps up the pressure and builds momentum toward an enduring fix of the filibuster, then that’ll be quite the twist to this drama: Evan Bayh had to leave the Senate to save it.

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A Proposed Compromise on the Filibuster

Friday, February 12th, 2010
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

Ezra Klein links to a Slate article by Ben Eidelson that, I think, is quietly devastating to the idea that the Senate filibuster has somehow destroyed the democratic process. Eidelson shows that from 1991 to 2008, in the typical successful filibuster, the senators behind the filibuster (i.e., opposing the cloture motion) represented states comprising 46 percent of the U.S. population. If filibustering Senators represented 51 percent of the population, then we would conclude that the typical successful filibuster was supported by senators representing a majority of Americans. In that case, at least by small-r republican principles, the filibuster would protect the will of the majority.

Forty-six percent is not 51 percent, of course. But here’s another way of thinking about the effect of the filibuster. It could be argued that, to account for the fact that most Americans’ views on most issues are only weakly held, we should have a higher threshold for legislation passing than support by a simple majority of senators, or even support by enough senators to represent a simple majority of Americans. Instead, for legislation to pass, we might decide that enough senators representing 55 percent of Americans should support the legislation. If that were the procedural guideline, then on average, the way the filibuster has worked has been consistent with that guideline.

For the practice of the filibuster when Republicans have been in the minority to be consistent with a procedural guideline, the rule would have to be that enough senators to represent 60 percent of Americans should support the legislation (see Eidelson’s table). Interestingly, however, despite the greater use of the filibuster among Republicans, in Eidelson’s data Republican minorities had an average of 20 successful filibusters per Congress, compared with 16.6 successful filibusters per Congress by Democratic minorities. That’s a fairly small difference, although the current Congress is not included in these figures.

Unlike most progressive bloggers, I remain ambivalent about the filibuster. Eidelson’s data shows that Republican filibusters are much more likely to be anti-majoritarian than Democratic filibusters (even if they are not dramatically anti-majoritarian). He proposes as a compromise, replacing the 60-vote rule for cloture votes with a 55-vote rule, which historically would have eliminated most successful Republican filibusters while retaining most successful Democratic ones. Another compromise that’s consistent with small-r republicanism and small-d democracy that might be more palatable to Republicans would be to implement instead something like a 55-percent-of-the-population rule for cloture votes (while still requiring a majority of senators too). This would set a higher threshold for support than simple majority-senator-rule, would ensure that small-state senators could not thwart the preferences of senators representing a solid majority of Americans, and would not have such dramatically partisan consequences compared with a 55-vote rule (meaning it would have a better chance of being implemented).

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Public Opposition to the Health Reform Bill — and Liberal Pundits Who Ignore It

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

There will be a mountain of analysis regarding the Brown victory in Massachusetts last night and what it means for health care reform. But what is striking to me this morning, skimming my RSS feeds, is the same thing I have found striking throughout the past year — how willfully ignorant liberal advocates of health care reform continue to be about public opinion on the Senate- and House-passed versions of health care reform.

There’s no need for extended analysis of the polling to make my point. Start with the basic favor/oppose trend for health care reform:

You can argue that people are uninformed. You can argue that Republicans have misled them. You can argue that people support something called “health care reform” as a general concept. But the numbers are what they are — only a minority supports the bills under consideration.

Faced with such numbers, reform advocates have defensively pointed out that much of the opposition to health care reform comes from the left, as if that somehow rendered the bills’ unpopularity irrelevant. What is devastating to their case, however, is a look at the intensity of views toward reform.

When assessing polling results, I have found it is crucial to employ what I call the Kessler Rule, after Third Way’s Jim Kessler. Jim argues that anytime someone tells a pollster that they are “somewhat” supportive or opposed to something, it basically means they don’t have strong feelings one way or another or that they have so little interest in the issue that they haven’t even formed an opinion. Rasmussen has been asking its respondents whether they “strongly” or “somewhat” support or oppose health care reform for months. The first time they asked was in August, during the congressional recess, when they found that 43 percent of respondents were strongly opposed, compared with 23 percent who were strongly supportive. Keep in mind, this was when the public option was still included in all major proposals, so liberal backlash was unlikely to have been much of a factor in this contrast.

The most recent poll Rasmussen conducted was over the weekend. Results: 44 percent strongly opposed, 18 percent strongly supportive.

You would think that such numbers would dent the confidence of reform advocates that the public overwhelmingly supported their own preferences. You would be wrong. Instead, incredibly, health care reform was cited throughout the fall and winter as Exhibit A for why we need to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate! If something as popular as health care reform faced such difficulty winning passage, it was argued, then the Senate can no longer govern!

Now with Scott Brown’s defeat of Martha Coakley, advocates have bent over backwards making the case that the election of a conservative in one of the most liberal states in the country — to fill a seat vacated by the patron saint of health care reform, at a time when the result would determine the fate of reform — had nothing to do with public opposition to reform.

Rasmussen’s election night survey says everything you need to know about how much these advocates are kidding themselves: 78 percent of Brown voters strongly oppose the health care bills before Congress.

What’s my point? It’s not that the case for health care reform is bunk or that policymakers should make their decisions based on polls. Like many progressives, I think the House should pass the Senate bill and that they should fix it later. (Unlike most progressives, my “fixes” would involve moving in the direction of Wyden-Bennett or even a more generous version of the House Republican bill rather than in the direction of House Democrats.) It’s not that liberal advocates should not spin issues in ways that promote their policy preferences. It’s that they should not believe their own spin — the country remains moderate. But don’t take it from me — take it from the 2010 electorate in November.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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An Interesting Idea for Senate Reform

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

The possibility of Democrats losing their 60th Senate seat in Massachusetts next week, slim as it is, should concentrate minds once again on the travesty of the 60-vote threshold for enacting legislation in the Senate. The Senate being what it is, of course, prospects for a major change in rules governing filibusters are not that good, unless some new dynamic is introduced.

At the American Prospect, Mark Schmitt may have identified an avenue for Senate reform: link rules restricting filibusters to rules tightening up the use of the budget reconciliation process.

He predicts, quite plausibly, that if Republicans continue to gum up the works in the Senate by voting en bloc against cloture motions, needing just one Democrat (at present) to hold up action, Democrats will increasingly resort to the reconciliation process, which fast-tracks legislation and prevents filibusters. But that’s hardly an ideal scenario:

[B]ecause budget reconciliation was designed for a completely different purpose it makes an awkward fit for big policy initiatives. It’s like entering a house through the pet door instead of the front door — you might fit, if you twist just the right way, but it will be painful. Provisions that don’t directly affect the budget can’t be included, so, for example, much of the fine detail of health-insurance regulation in the current bill would likely have been lost if pushed through reconciliation. If Congress chose reconciliation as the means to pass a jobs bill, it could include tax credits for job creation but probably not many of the infrastructure-spending initiatives that would directly create jobs.

Still, what choice does any majority party in the Senate have if the minority party chooses to block all major legislation? The experience with health reform is all but certain to create momentum among Democrats for using reconciliation whenever possible. And thus the dilemma, says Schmitt:

So what we have in the Senate are two extremes: the rigid, partisan system of near-total stasis created by the filibuster, on the one hand, and the merciless, closed-door, majority-controlled arcane process of budget reconciliation on the other. A solution might be found in reforming both: Loosen the stranglehold of the filibuster…. And in return, offer the minority party a reform of the power of budget reconciliation that currently cuts them out entirely. Start by permanently limiting reconciliation to measures that actually reduce the deficit (a rule the Democrats adopted in this Congress) and then look at reforms that open up the process to longer debate and a wider range of amendments.

Schmitt cites a number of feasible filibuster reforms, including Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposal to gradually lower the votes needed for cloture after repeated efforts to move legislation are thwarted, along with the very popular idea of requiring actual stemwinding filibusters instead of paper threats. But what’s important is Schmitt’s notion of packaging together reforms attractive to both majority and minority parties. The big question is whether Republicans are interested in any reforms, if only because they hope someday to return to majority status in the Senate. Maybe a bill or two whipped through the Senate via reconciliation would bring them around.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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The Founders and the Filibuster

Monday, January 11th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Current defenders of the de facto 60-vote requirement for enactment of legislation by the United States Senate invariably argue that a non-representative and obstructionist upper legislative chamber was crucial to the Founding Fathers’ system of constitutional checks and balances. Without a cranky and institutionally conservative Senate, you see, popular majorities might run roughshod over minority rights, and/or enshrine highly temporary objects of popular enthusiasm into law.

Attorney/activist Tom Geoghegan blows up this line of reasoning very effectively in aNew York Times op-ed piece that appeared yesterday. His main argument is that by requiring Senate supermajorities in very select circumstances, the Founders made it clear they did not contemplate a universal, routine supermajority requirement for every circumstance. This is, in fact, a very recent development, accomplished through the abandonment of actual filibusters for threatened filibusters as an obstructionist tactic, and then the routinization of filibuster threats. What used to be an extreme and controversial measure–an actual filibuster–that was very difficult to deploy has now become the normal order of business in the Senate.

Had the Founders wanted the Senate to require supermajorities for all sorts of legislation, they would have placed it right there in the Constitution. But they did no such thing.

Geoghegan offers several avenues for challenging the Supermajority Senate outrage. But his best contribution is an argument that will leave constitutional “originalists” sputtering in confusion.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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Has Political Polarization Been One-Sided? Part Two

Friday, December 18th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

To read the first part of this post, click here.

Defining the Center

Let’s examine Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center.” When they compare activists to independents, changes in the distance from independents may be due to growing extremism among activists. However, the distance may grow without activists changing their views at all if independents change their views. So saying Republican activists drifted further away from the center than Democratic activists may misstate what occurred; independents may simply have drifted toward Democratic activists over time without activists drifting anywhere. It’s also possible that Republican activists have grown more extreme, which has pushed independents closer to Democratic activists’ (unchanged) views.

Furthermore, secular changes in ideology over time can move people from the independent category into Democratic and Republican camps and vice versa, making it difficult to say whether the changes identified indicate that activists (or independents) are changing their views, or that it’s just flows into or out of the parties that is changing. If one of the parties looks more or less extreme, it could simply be that people who would have called themselves independent in the past are now identifying with one of the parties, making the leftover independents look somewhat more extreme in the opposite direction.

Rather than compare activists to independents, why not simply measure how far they are from the midpoint of the ideology scale? When one does so, one obtains the graph below.

Trends in Activist Ideology (ideology midpoint)

By this measure, which avoids all of the problems with using independents as a reference point, the change in extremism among Democratic activists looks exactly the same as the trend for Republican activists. Once again, Republican activists look more extreme in any year, and this time (not shown) this remains the case when one looks at the unsmoothed data points.

A Better Way to Measure Ideology

There is also a problem with Hacker and Pierson’s measure of ideology. If we want to know whether party activists have become ideologically more extreme over time, we should use as pure a measure of ideology as possible. The measure Hacker and Pierson use, however, conflates ideology with tolerance and empathy because it is based on questions asking how warm or cold one feels toward liberals and conservatives. It could be that Democratic activists are simply more tolerant of their opponents than Republican activists rather than being more centrist. One can feel warmly toward a group without identifying oneself with it.

A better measure of changing ideology among party activists would be to look directly at changes in self-identified ideology. The NES asks respondents to place themselves on a 7-point scale ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Here, then, is a final chart showing trends for activists in each party, with ideology measured as the distance of activists from “4” – the midpoint of the seven-point scale. The actual data points are connected and the smoothed trends are shown as black dashed lines. It should be noted that this chart is based on even smaller sample sizes than Hacker and Pierson’s, so I show the margin of error for the data points as dashed vertical lines. I also omit off-year elections to make the chart less noisy.

Trends in Activist Ideology (self-ID)
This chart confirms that Republican activists more often than not have been more extreme than Democratic activists, though the two groups were statistically tied in 1972, 1976, 1992, and 2004. There is a clear trend toward greater extremism among Republican activists. Among Democratic activists, there was little consistency between 1972 and 1998, but they appear to have moved to the center in 2000 and 2002 before jumping up to the level of Republican extremism in 2004.

Finally, there is the claim by Hacker and Pierson that Democratic activists are more centrist than other Democrats. In my results, this was not true in 2004 whether one used the thermometer index or the self-identified seven-point ideology measure and was not true in 2002 unless one used the seven-point measure (which Hacker and Pierson did not). Regardless, none of the differences between the two groups – in my results or theirs – are statistically significant due to the small sample sizes.

In sum, Republican activists have generally been at least as extreme as Democratic activists and often more so, though not in 2004, which makes the Republican pattern seem less worrisome. Furthermore, while in 2002 it looked like Republican extremism had increased and Democrats had become more moderate, by 2004 Democrats had completely caught up to Republicans. Republican and Democratic activists were equally far from the center in 1972 and in 2004, so the shift was of the same magnitude for both. And there’s no reliable evidence that Democratic activists are more moderate than other Democrats.

The Bush administration and the Republican Congress may have used various tactics in order to pass an agenda that lacked strong support. But they were not “off center” if that phrase is taken to mean that their agenda was outside the bounds of what the public supported. Or more specifically, where Republicans succeeded, their agenda was not out of bounds. Hacker and Pierson downplayed the extent to which Republicans had to reach out to the center in what they did or did not favor. Education spending, for instance, increased more under Bush than under Clinton, in a nod to “compassionate conservatism.” Furthermore, where Republicans truly moved off center, they failed, as with Social Security privatization. And of course, 2006 and 2008 happened.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Has Political Polarization Really Been One-Sided?

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

OK, to review the debate so far: I wrote a post suggesting progressives might want to think twice before jettisoning the filibuster. Ed thought twice and said, yup, still want to get rid of it. Ezra did the same. I wrote another post saying, oh well whatever nevermind and tried to shift the subject to polarization being the real problem. I said I’d follow up about whether increasing polarization has been a one-sided affair. Crickets chirped. All hell broke loose on the health care reform front. And here we are.

So….one-sided polarization….Ever since Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center, all good progressives know that the growing political polarization has been one-sided, with Republicans pulling public policy “off center” through various nefarious means. Right?

Well….yes and no. Hacker and Pierson argued that, as of 2005, Republican activists and legislators had grown more conservative, but Democratic activists and legislators had not grown more liberal (and had even moved to the right themselves in some regards). Along with this shift, Republicans had developed effective strategies to move public policy further rightward than the typical voter preferred.

Since the rightward shift of Republicans occurred during a period in which Hacker and Pierson showed the distribution of self-identified ideology had not changed, the implication was that the electorate was being deprived of the more progressive policies that it desired. But a closer look at their data and analyses shows that while the increase in polarization among legislators has occurred disproportionately among Republicans, the evidence hints that this is because it proceeded from a Nixon-era Democratic Congress that was well to the left of the electorate.

Rather than refuting the idea that policy reflects the preferences of voters in the middle (the “median voter theorem”), as Hacker and Pierson claimed, the evidence actually bolsters this view. Correcting their claims is important if progressives are to govern effectively. Republicans did not simply pull public policy to the right of where Americans preferred, and now that Democrats are back in control of Congress, progressives should not assume that the median voter is leftier than she really is.

Why Off Center Is Off

To argue their case, Hacker and Pierson turned to scores created by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that put members of Congress past and present on a common scale measuring ideological position. Hacker and Pierson report that the polarization of Congress between the early 1970s and the early 2000s was almost entirely due to growing extremism among Republicans. Democratic legislators had not moved nearly as far from the center. Because of the increasing conservatism of Republicans, Congress was, in the early 2000s, far to the right of the median voter, who had not grown more conservative over time. But Hacker and Pierson’s account is flawed.

Consider the Senate.* Poole and Rosenthal’s scores, using every vote by every member of every Congress through the 108th Congress (which ran from 2003 to 2004), indicate that the “center” as of 2003-04 was typified by northeastern Republicans such as Lincoln Chafee, then-Independent Jim Jeffords, and William Cohen; Arlen Specter (now, of course, a Democrat); and by red-state Democrats such as Ben Nelson and John Breaux. In 1971-72, the median senator had a score of -0.056, equivalent to Ben Nelson’s score in 2003-04. By 2003-04, the median senator had a score of 0.061, equivalent to Arlen Specter in 2003-04.

This small change in the median of the Senate as a whole only hints at the fact that, as Hacker and Pierson claim, Republican senators did move farther ideologically than Democratic senators. The evidence that Hacker and Pierson presented describes how the median in one year compared with then-recent senators’ scores. In the early 1970s, according to Hacker and Pierson, the median Republican senator lay “significantly to the left of current GOP maverick John McCain of Arizona—around where conservative Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia stood” [where the references to McCain and Miller are to their 2003-04 scores, italics in the original]. The median Republican senator’s score then “doubled” by the early 2000s so that it sat “just shy of the ultraconservative position of Senator Rick Santorum.”

These descriptions do not quite reflect what the Poole-Rosenthal scores show. The median Republican senator’s score in 1971-72 was equidistant between McCain in 2003-04 and Miller in 2003-04, not closer to Miller, and it was just as close to McCain as the median Republican senator’s score in 2003-04 was to Santorum.

This claim also raises a technical issue. The Poole-Rosenthal scores are not ratio scales with a meaningful zero point. The distance between 0.2 and 0.4 is supposed to be the same as that between 1.2 and 1.4, but 1.2 is not “six times as conservative” as 0.2, because a score of 0 does not indicate the complete absence of conservatism. The zero point is completely arbitrary. The doubling from 0.2 to 0.4 would become an increase of just 50 percent if we added 0.2 to all of the scores (from 0.4 to 0.6). We cannot know whether Republican senators grew twice as conservative between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. Indeed, the phrase “twice as conservative” has no obvious meaning.

More to the point, Hacker and Pierson’s interpretation of these results is an even bigger problem. Rather than the Republican Party drifting ever rightward (the whole time increasingly “off center”), if the Democratic Party was “off center” in the early 1970s, then the movement among Republicans could be interpreted as a restoration of an equilibrium reflecting voter preferences. This is exactly what appears to have happened.

First of all, the medians for the 2003-04 Senate were 0.379 and -0.381 for Republicans and Democrats – essentially identical. That means that after this great rightward shift by Republicans, the parties were equally “extreme” by historical standards. Furthermore, the median Democratic senator in 1971-72 wasn’t much less extreme than the median senator from either party in 2003-04.

Second, at least in terms of self-identification, the ideological distribution of Americans was unchanged over this period, with roughly twice as many people calling themselves conservative as calling themselves liberal.**

Taking these facts together – a rightward shift by Republican legislators, an end state where Democrats and Republicans are equally “extreme”, and an ideological distribution among voters that was static over the period (and right-leaning) – the conclusion that best fits is that the Democratic Congress of 1971-72 was off center rather than the Republican Congress of 2003-04. The median Republican became more extreme over time, but that was because Congress became more representative of the electorate, not less. The story on the House side is much the same, except that the median Republican was a bit more “extreme” than the median Democrat by 2003-04 (although no more extreme than the median Democrat was in 1971-72).

Comparing the Activists

Hacker and Pierson also argue that Republican activists grew more extreme while Democratic activists became less so (becoming even less extreme than Democrats in general), but these claims are also problematic. Hacker and Pierson began by defining an activist as someone who self-identifies as a Democrat or a Republican and who participated in three out of five election-related activities asked about in the American National Election Studies. They measured ideology using a combination of two “thermometer” items – one of which asks respondents how warm or cold they feel toward liberals and one inquiring about conservatives. These scales range from 0 (cold) to 97 (hot). (The scale ends at 97 rather than 100 because in some years, the NES used codes 98 and 99 as missing value codes.) The liberal score is subtracted from 97 (so that high numbers then signify cold feelings) and then added to the conservative score. This number is divided by two, 0.5 is added to it, and the decimal is dropped. The resulting measure ranges from 0 (extremely warm toward liberals and extremely cold toward conservatives) to 97 (extremely cold toward liberals and extremely warm toward conservatives).

To determine how far activists drift from the center, they compared the activist scores on this index to the scores for independent voters. The distance from independents is expressed in percentage terms (e.g., 10 percent more conservative or liberal). Hacker and Pierson plotted the average distance from independents for Republican and Democratic activists and then “smoothed” the trends by imposing curves to describe them. The result is a graph that I replicated, more or less:

Trends in Activist Ideology (smoothed)

The graph shows that Republican activists were more extreme than Democratic activists to begin with, that they became more conservative over time, and that after becoming more liberal, Democratic activists tacked back toward the center. The first important thing to note about this graph is how much the nice, smooth lines depend on fitting the data points to a quadratic equation. The original data – without the smoothing – looks much messier:

Trends in Activist Ideology (not smoothed)

The upward trend among Republican activists is still readily apparent, but the trend for Democratic activists no longer points toward moderation. The bouncing around is partly due to different turnout patterns in off-year elections, but also a result of statistical noise, as the sample sizes for each group are less than 70 – and as low as 18 – in each year. Furthermore, Republican and Democratic activists are statistically the same distance from the center for much of the period between 1968 and 1992. To illustrate further how deceptive the smoothed trend lines can be, look what happens to them when 2004 data – which was not available when Hacker and Pierson created the graph – is added:

Trends in Activist Ideology (+ 04)

The Republican line hardly changes, but now Democratic activists appear to grow steadily more liberal. It still appears as though Republican activists drifted from the center more than Democratic activists did, and Republican activists look more extreme in all years.

OK, take a breather. Tomorrow I’ll wrap up with some revealing evidence about how Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center” affects these analyses of political activists.

To read the second part of this post, click here.

——————————————

* Following their recent book, Polarized America (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, 2006), I use scores on Poole and Rosenthal’s first DW-NOMINATE dimension (for details, see http://polarizedamerica.com/ and http://www.voteview.com). Hacker and Pierson report using “d nominate” scores, but these are only constructed through the 99th Congress, so I am inclined to believe that they too used the first DW-NOMINATE dimension scores.

** Hacker and Pierson (2004), page 38. Hacker and Pierson cite ANES data. According to Gallup data showing self-identified ideology, the breakdown among Americans as a whole in 2004 was roughly 20 percent liberal, 40 percent moderate, and 40 percent conservative (Wave 2 of the June Poll, Question D10). In 1972, it was 25 percent, 34 percent, and 37 percent (Poll 851, Question 14).

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Yet More on the Filibuster and Polarization

Monday, November 30th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

I was going to title this post, “Ed Kilgore, You are Dead to Me,” but then again, I like Ed a lot, and he’s far more knowledgeable about politics than I am, and I don’t disagree with much of what he’s said about the filibuster.

Just as Ed isn’t “hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster,” neither would I shed many tears if it were to go away. I, too, object to how routine filibuster threats have become. That said, I do think that its elimination would have the potential to hurt progressive aims. Saying that the Senate “has a built-in red-state bias” makes the point — get rid of the filibuster and that bias means that red-state priorities are more likely to benefit from its elimination.

What I’d like to do here is start the first of a couple of posts on political polarization to defend my position that the filibuster wouldn’t be such a problem if we could make the Congress more representative of the nation. I think this point is actually implicit (almost explicit!) in commentary from Mark Schmitt and Ezra Klein that notes how the routinization of the filibuster is a recent phenomenon that owes its timing to the completion of what Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have called “The Great Sorting-Out.” Over the past 40 years, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have gone the way of the dodo bird, making the parties more polarized along ideological lines.

LBJ could count on Medicare passing in 1965 because the existence of liberal and moderate Republicans made the successful deployment of the filibuster unlikely. On the GOP side, conservatives would have had to court a sizeable number of right-leaning Democrats to make a filibuster threat credible. The difficulty of doing so (particularly with a southern Democrat as intimidating as LBJ applying countervailing pressure) gave Republican moderates little incentive to go along with such a threat. On the Democratic side, the opportunity for a single senator to engage in grandstanding or deal-making in exchange for his vote was limited by the same dynamics — the ability to get moderate GOP votes would have allowed the leadership to ignore such threats. Unless the issue was one as momentous and controversial as civil rights, southern Democrats and conservative Republicans would not collaborate across the aisle.

Fast-forward to 1994, when there were far fewer conservative Democrats and far fewer moderate Republicans. In such an environment, the filibuster became an obvious strategy — because it could work. The filibuster was not a problem until the completion of The Great Sorting-Out. (And yes, Republicans have deployed filibuster threats far more often than Democrats have, largely because the Democrats are more dependent on their moderates than the Republicans are on theirs — a point to which I’ll return in the next post.)

Now, Ed is right that the power that party primaries give the least-moderate voters is not solely to blame for this (though let’s not discount the likelihood that the primary reforms between 1968 and 1972 accelerated the ideological sorting between the parties). But a solution to political polarization need not address its causes.

The key questions, it seems to me, are (1) whether one thinks that the parties are ideologically representative of their supporters or members and (2) whether one thinks that that is true on both sides. Kicking (2) to my next post, I’ll just say that Morris Fiorina’s research definitively shows that the obvious political polarization among elites, political junkies, and elected officials is not reflected among Americans as a whole. The reason that we have more political polarization — even between presidential candidates — is because the candidates on offer have been chosen by less-moderate primary voters and activists. Because relatively moderate voters still have to choose between two options, the growing polarization of party activists and primary voters translates into growing polarization among elected officials — even as the electorate has remained relatively moderate.

Whether you think the electorate is, in its heart of hearts, moderate is irrelevant in some sense, but what is fairly clear is that at least by the measures available, it has not become more polarized. And to circle back to my original contention that progressives should think twice before wanting to throw out the filibuster, political polarization makes the filibuster more important as a check against small majorities. The less moderate the two caucuses are, the more unrepresentative of popular preferences will be the legislation that can pass with narrow margins.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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Progressives and the Filibuster—Round 2

Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

One of the functions of The Progressive Fix is to not only to provide an online outlet for “pragmatic progressives” but also to demonstrate that their antipathy to ideological litmus tests extends to their own ranks.

In that spirit, I will take issue with a post published here on Friday by Scott Winship, who is an esteemed friend and colleague, and my predecessor as managing editor over at The Democratic Strategist. Scott offered a defense of the Senate filibuster on traditional, anti-tyranny-of-the-majority grounds, and then suggested that the real problem in the Senate is partisan polarization, with the solution being reforms in primary laws to reduce the power of the “ideological extremes.”

To be clear, my disagreement with Scott on this issue is only partial. I am not hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster as a possibility under the Senate rules (though not opposed to that step in principle, either). But what I object to categorically is the routinization of filibuster threats in recent years, to the point where the Senate has come perilously close to creating an entirely new, non-constitutionally-sanctioned 60-vote requirement for the enactment of all significant legislation (other than provisions taken up under specified exceptions to the usual rules, like the Congressional Budget Act).

Since the Senate already has a built-in red-state bias, a supermajority requirement would basically represent a death sentence for progressive initiatives in the near future.  Yes, I know some Democrats (though not me) celebrated the filibuster when the shoe was on the other foot a few years back, but on the other hand, nobody was excoriating Republicans for demanding that their own senators vote for cloture, were they?

All Filibuster, All the Time

And that’s the crux of the matter today — not the possibility of filibusters, but the elimination of any disincentive to engage in a filibuster on every single piece of legislation. Some senators are acting as though the right to vote one’s conscience or interests on a bill is identical to the right to obstruct it by denying it a floor vote, meaning that the normal practice of party discipline on procedural matters somehow does not extend to the most important procedural matter: votes to end a filibuster — i.e., cloture votes. So even if Democrats have (as they do right now) an improbable and (probably) unsustainable 60 Senate votes, that’s not enough unless they also have 60 votes for a specific bill. That particular shoe has not been on the other foot in living memory, but even if it had been, I certainly think Republicans should have been free to sanction their members for combining with the opposition to bring the Senate, and the country, to a standstill.

If Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson considers it a matter of deep principle to vote against cloture to block final passage of health care reform (probably for the next decade or so, given the precedents on this topic), that’s well and good, but they should have to pay a price — such as losing a rung on the seniority ladder.

Scott, as noted above, argues that the current situation in the Senate is the product of “polarization,” which he seems to blame equally on both parties, and offers the remedy of electoral reforms to reduce that polarization. By this I assume he means some form of open primary. Scott is a very smart man who knows, I am sure, that “polarization” hasn’t simply been produced by closed primaries. Much of it has resulted from a gradual process of ideological sorting-out between the two major parties that is entirely healthy and natural, as compared to the longstanding dependence on ethnic, religious, and regional factors for party identification that may have made “bipartisanship” technically easier but didn’t really offer most voters (e.g., southerners choosing between Democratic and Republican conservatives and northeasterners choosing between Democratic and Republican liberals) more choice than they have today. If you look at the Senate right now, it’s hard to identify more than a few senators whose behavior would change if they were exposed, say, to primary voting by registered independents (many hard-core southern conservative Republicans are from states with no party registration at all).

Dealing with the Party of No

More to the point, the unity of Senate Republicans right now flows less from the fear of primary opponents from the hard right than it does from a corporate decision by the GOP as an institution that it must destroy the Obama administration by any means necessary. A contributing factor to this decision is the strange but overwhelmingly maintained belief of Republicans that the only way to distance themselves from the hyper-partisan Bush administration’s disastrous record is by claiming it was too liberal! When it comes to big-ticket issues like health care reform and climate change, Republicans have clearly shifted to the right during the last few years, even as Democrats have consistently sought middle ground (e.g., market-based carbon cap-and-trade and a “premium support” approach to universal health care).

So in my opinion, the immediate solution to the polarization of the Senate isn’t an impossible effort to reach accommodation with more than a very few Republicans, or letting a few “centrists” write every bill. Instead, there ought to be a reasonable insistence that Democrats reject the supermajority requirement and support the party on cloture votes as a matter of course. We can then maintain our big-tent party by letting heterodox Democrats stray on final passage of key legislation as they wish. And we can also invite Republicans to go to the country with a stirring, populist campaign slogan of “throw the cloturers out.”

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Should Progressives Favor Ending the Filibuster?

Friday, November 20th, 2009
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

A CNN poll out this week must have been a disappointment to some progressives. According to the poll, a majority of the public – 56 percent – supports the use of the filibuster in the Senate, versus 39 percent who oppose it. I wouldn’t bet the farm that this majority would hold up against any number of equivalent questions worded differently, but the results should at least prompt us to stop and think about the growing end-the-filibuster strain on the left.

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, among other progressives, have grown increasingly frustrated with the Senate as the imperative of winning 60 senators’ votes for a health care reform bill has driven the debate on the Hill this year. But hold up! Are progressives really willing to take their chances with a future GOP-controlled Senate empowered to pass whatever they have 51 votes for? With the Supreme Court nominees who could be seated (to say nothing of other judgeships)? With the restrictions on abortion and LGBQT rights? With welfare reforms?

These culture-war issues call to mind one of the benefits of the filibuster — it protects unpopular groups and rights from the tyranny of the majority. Indeed, as Klein and Yglesias have also argued, the Senate’s structure already gives outsized influence to small states with relatively conservative electorates. “Majority rule” isn’t quite as enlightened a principle when the majority is a majority of senators rather than a majority of the national electorate.

Of course, the filibuster also prevents the will of the majority of voters from being implemented in some instances. But there is something to be said for requiring that the most consequential policies have more support than a simple 50.1 percent majority. Large tax changes, changes to major programs, and the creation of new ones are often hard to undo. In some ways it makes sense to subject such legislation to a higher bar.

Klein has argued that the filibuster makes entitlement reform and governing itself practically impossible, but I think this is a misreading of the problem. The reason that prospects for major reforms are so dim is not that such reforms require 60 votes — it is that the Senate has become so polarized that there are too few swing votes available to get to 60.

One can imagine a Senate in which legislators could be arranged in a continuum from most liberal to most conservative such that there were as many moderates as liberals as conservatives. Or there might be a lot of moderates bunched up in the middle with few Senators at the extremes. In such a Senate, it would not be particularly difficult to get to 60 votes — there would often be compromises to be found to get over the bar.

However, the Senate that we have looks like this:

Poole-Rosenthal Scores for 110th Senate

Those are Poole-Rosenthal scores for the 110th Senate (the previous one), with liberals to the left and conservatives to the right. You probably can name most of those “centrist” dots that bridge the clumps to the left and right (from left to right, the six closest to the center are Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, Gordon Smith, and Norm Coleman).

If the “Senate problem” is really about polarization, then the most obvious practical solution that presents itself is one that many progressives may not be too excited about – reform of primary elections so that senators are not chosen from the most ideological parts of their constituencies. But ironically, it’s possible that that would be the best way to achieve more progressive victories while at the same time avoiding tyrannical majorities.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.*

*Note: The original version of this post omitted the disclaimer.

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