Filibuster about to be defanged?

This post is a follow-up on the Republican obstructionism I discussed in yesterday's post.

Heather Cox Richardson explains the background of the filibuster at the first part of this talk, History & Politics Chat: March 16, 2021:

Digby Parton has been one of the best observers and analysts of Republican obstructionism since she started blogging in the early 2000s She looks at the latest developments related to the Senate filibuster in McConnell's filibuster threats are already backfiring: Biden signals support for major Senate reform Salon 03/17/2021

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went into full snapping-turtle mode and growled out the bluff Digby discusses in that post. Mitch McConnell warns or 'scorched earth' over filibuster Reuters 03/16/2021:

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey talks about his (fairly recent) opposition to the filibuster in this interview, Sen. Markey Says 'Filibuster Has to Go,' Rules are Being 'Perverted' by GOP The Mehdi Hasan Show 05/18/2021.

I was pleasantly surprised to see President Biden come out explicitly for going back to the "talking filibuster," which as Richardson explains requires Senators to hold the floor by having someone speaking continually, the classic way the filibuster was used in most of the 20th century. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a report on the Filibuster and "cloture" rule by which the Senate can end debate and forced a vote on the measure at hand, Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate 04/07/2017.

This Reuters article (Susan Cornwell, What is the U.S. Senate filibuster and why is everyone talking about it? 03/17/2021) explains an important aspect of the current conflict over the filibuster. The current filibuster rule allows a Senator to hold up a bill without having to have someone continually talk on the Senate floor.

In 1975, the Senate reduced the requirement for limiting debate to three-fifths of the Senate - currently 60 senators.

In that decade, the Senate leadership began agreeing to allow measures that were facing a filibuster to be put aside while the chamber acted on other bills.

The move was intended to prevent opposition to a single bill bringing all work in the Senate to halt, but it also meant that the filibuster changed from an energy-draining maneuver involving lengthy speeches to a mere objection, or threat to object.

Over time the number of filibusters skyrocketed. There is no sure-fire way of counting how many bills are filibustered in a year because of the nebulous nature of the threats. But a count of votes to try to overcome a filibuster, the nearest reliable proxy, shows 298 such votes in the 2019-2020 legislative session. That’s up from 168 such votes in the previous two years. In 1969-1970 there were six.

Putting filibustered bills aside “made filibustering actually more successful, and even less costly, which was not intended. And it might have, paradoxically, made things worse,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a book on the filibuster. [my emphasis]

Under the current rules, one Senator can "filibuster" by raising an objection to a bill being voted on - it's called putting a "hold" on a bill - and it requires a (filibuster-ending) cloture to end it. In practice, that creates a de facto supermajority requirement of 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

The filibuster has been already been abolished altogether for consideration of judicial nominations. And the "reconciliation" procedure that was used to pass the COVID relief bill recently is also a way around the filibuster, though it is restricted to matters that have a significant budget impact.

Returning to the "talking filibuster" concept would definitely be a big improvement over the current situation. However, the filibuster was often used successfully in the 20th century to block civil rights legislation like federal anti-lynching laws. The Senate is already by its composition with two Senators for each state, so that Utah with its 253 thousand inhabitants has the same Senate representation as California with its 40 million. That would be reason enough to abolish the filibuster altogether, which can be done by majority vote in the Senate.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, explained how the Republicans changed the function of the filibuster qualitativly and for the worse after Obama became President in 2009:

[A]ttempts at filibuster and formal responses to them-meaning actual cloture motions to shut off debate-remained relatively rare, even during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The number of cloture motions did increase after that, mostly because a handful of individual conservative senators, especially Democrat James Allen of Alabama and Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina, seeing the role of Southern conservatives as a bloc decline, began to use more creative ways to gain leverage. This included finding ways to extend debate after a filibuster was invoked by offering hundreds of amendments and insisting on a vote on each. Still, even with Allen remaining active until his death in 1978, the average number of cloture motions filed in a given month was less than two; it increased to around three a month in the 1980s, jumped a bit in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, and then leveled off in the early Bush years. But starting in 2006, this number spiked dramatically and even more with the election of Barack Obama. In the 110th Congress, 2007-2008, and in the 111th Congress, the number of cloture motions filed when the Senate was in session was on the order of two a week! [my emphasis]

(For philosophy fans, that could be used as an example of Hegel's notion of quantity turning into quality.)

As Digby observes in her post, "let's not kid ourselves. Those norms [of government institutions including the Senate] had always only been as strong as the people who were charged with upholding them and those agreements were unraveling long before Trump entered politics."

Mann and Ornstein give a quick overview of how the radicalization of the Republican Party continued until Trump became President in How the Republicans Broke Congress New York Times 12/02/2017.

And the radicalization continues, even after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As they famously put it in their 2012 book:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges. [my emphasis]

The Democratic push for bipartisanship and massive Republican resistance during the Obama Presidency

Obstruction works for Republicans opposing a Democratic President. It works because they are willing to do it. And it works because Democrats all too often are unwilling to use entirely legitimate tools at their disposal to overcome the obsttrucion.

In the introduction to their important 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than Itz Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, define the problem as follows. They use an example of what I would describe as really bad economic policy combined with really bad politics, a resolution known as the Conrad-Gregg proposal.

A contemporary article from The Hill described it this way (Gregg: Fiscal panel bill lacks the votes 01/12/2010):

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) told The Hill on Monday that the proposal he’s pushing with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) doesn’t have the 60 Senate votes necessary to pass. An amendment creating the fiscal commission will get a full Senate vote next week during a debate over a bill raising the debt limit.

Gregg and Conrad’s plan would set up a process to come up with a bipartisan fiscal reform package that would be ensured a vote on the House and Senate floors. The commission’s supporters, mainly centrist lawmakers in both chambers, have said that the special legislative process is necessary to any fiscal reform because lawmakers aren’t willing to consider the politically perilous tax increases and spending cuts necessary to bring down the deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year. The Senate bill has 33 co-sponsors in addition to Gregg and Conrad. [my emphasis]

Obama's push for the Grand Bargain

This effort was part of President Obama's pursuit of a "Grand Bargain," a fundamentally conservative idea that Obama held that was also bad politics. The idea was that Republicans would agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and the Democrats would agree to make cuts to "entitlements," which means primarily Social Security and Medicare, but is also used to include Medicaid. Obama floated this idea during his 2008-9 Presidential transition period, pointedly raising it to a group of conservative journalists. Digby Parton was sounding the alarm about it even at the time. (Fiscal Madness Hullabaloo 01/11/2009)

This is what Obama was telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos on national TV even before he was sworn in as President, but knowing that he was going to have very solid Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate ('This Week' Transcript: Barack Obama ABC News 01/11/2009):

OBAMA: So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.

I'm not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And when will that get done?

OBAMA: Well, the -- right now I'm focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure that we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you describe is exactly what we're going to have to do.

What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?

STEPHANOPOULOS: And eventually sacrifice from everyone.

OBAMA: Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. [my emphasis]

So Obama first pushed through a stimulus package that economists including Paul Krugman was about half as big as it needed to be to start an adequately strong recovery, and one heavily weighted toward tax cuts whose stimulative value was dubious, and one that despite his compromises with Republicans failed to win any significant Republican support in Congress.

And in a move that was a kind of apology for passing stimulus at all, Obama stressed the need for cutting the deficit, and appointed the notorious Bowles-Simpson Commission, officially called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, with a charge to come up with an austerity plan. Critics called it the Catfood Commission, as in "Let Grandma Eat Catfood," to highlight the fact that the two programs so critical for older people - and two programs that were and are spectacularly popular and successful and identified with the Democratic Party - Social Security and Medicare - were the prime targets of this austerity project. As Obama told Stephanopoulos, "Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." Especially people with old skin.

How did any Democrat ever convince themselves that this was good policy or good politics?

The economics of federal deficits

To be fair to establishment Democrats, for a long time even liberal economists held to the idea that the deficit was important to control or eliminate. Even in "pure" Keynesian terms, many liberals held to Keynes' own position that the federal budget should be balanced over the business cycle. That is, the government should run deficits to stimulate the economy in recessions and reduce deficits during expansions. John Kenneth Galbraith explained in his classic The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical problem with this, which is that it's easier for politicians to vote to increase spending and cut taxes during recessions than it is for them to reduce spending and raise taxes during expansions.

His son Jamie Galbraith explained in the same context that Obama was addressing in his 2009 Grand Bargain talk why the deficit obsession of that moment was wildly misguided in terms of real-world economics. (The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)) Without getting into the weeds, the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system in 1973 meant that the dollar became a de facto international reserve currency, and it remains so. There is an accounting identity which he explained this way:

There is a basic relationship in macroeconomics, as fundamental as it is poorly understood, that links the internal and the international financial position of any country. A country's internal deficit, that is, its "public" deficit and its "private" deficit - the annual borrowing by companies and household - will together equal its international deficit.

Money flows are part of the international deficit, and as long as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, other countries will hold significant amounts of dollars as reserves. Along with the US trade deficits, this means that the US has run chronic international deficits for decades and will continue to do so. So the only way the federal budget goes into surplus, as it did briefly at the end of the Clinton Administration, is if private companies and households are collectively borrowing more than they are spending, i.e., creating a "private" deficit. That only happens at a time of net investment in the private economy, where the borrowing in a given year is higher than the spending.

In other words, the federal government doesn't actually control whether there is a public deficit or not. State and local governments are required to balance their budgets annually. So if spending exceeds borrowing in the private economy, the federal government will run a deficit. (Accounting relations like this sometimes sound downright mystical. But in this case, they reflect real-world macroeconomic effects.)

The 2011 "Grand Bargain" fiasco

Mann and Ornstein in their book describe how the Republicans obstructed the Conrad-Gregg proposal to force a vote on the kind of deficit reductions the Republicans had been saying they themselves wanted.

The true Republican positions on deficits since "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," as the former Bush-Cheney Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Dick Cheney told him. The Bush-Quayle Administration did cooperate with Democrats on a tax increase, but it was distinctly unpopular among the Republican base. "Deficits don't matter" has been the real position of the Republican Party since 1980.

How did the Republicans block the Conrad-Gregg proposal? By using the filibuster. With the full support of that legendary Bold Maverick John McCain, who always bragged about his ability to "reach across the aisle," i.e., work in a "bipartisan" way with Democrats:

But on January 26, [2011] the Senate blocked the resolution. Fifty-three senators supported it, but it could not garner the sixty votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Among those who voted to sustain the filibuster and kill the resolution were Mitch McConnell and John McCain. McCain was joined in opposition by six other original cosponsors, all Republicans. Never before have cosponsors of a major bill conspired to kill their own idea, in an almost Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Why did they do so? Because President Barack Obama was for it, and its passage might gain him political credit.

Even after that setback, the Obama-Biden Administration continued to bang their heads against that wall, in pursuit of the chimaera of a Bipartisan Grand Bargain that was especially unpopular among Democratic voters. (Jay Newton-Small, The Inside Story of Obama and Boehner’s Second Failed Grand Bargain Time 07/23/2011)

David Atkins gave an idea of the wretched politics of this later effort in The New York Times reports. You decide. Hullabaloo 07/22/2011.

It was this political context that gave rise a few months earlier to what I like to call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Mann and Ornstein themselves cautioned in 2011, "Maneuvering tirelessly to stake out some elusive political center, in other words, won’t help Obama win over swing voters. It’ll just set him up for another year of looking weak and ineffectual." (David Brooks’s Awful Advice to Obama New Republic 10/28/2011)

What Mann and Ornstein highlight throughout their 2012 book is the asymmetric partisan polarization of American politics. That involves the continual radicalization of the Republican Party which has not remotely been matched by a similar ideological polarization on the Democratic side. And still isn't today. (See: the January 6 Capitol insurrection directly incited by Republican President Donald Trump.)

And the seemingly eternal conservative Democratic argument for promoting conservative policies that their own Democratic base voters dislike is that it's a way to appeal to swing voters who supposedly love bipartisanship. Obama relied on this argument, although for him it seems to have been more than a cynical political argument. He really did seem to value "bipartisanship" as a good thing in itself. But he also claimed it was good politics. Whatever the ontological virtue of Bipartisanship may be, the latter assumption was clearly wrong in 2011, as Mann and Ornstein relate:

America got [a] crisis-the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression-and a pretty clear signal from the voters, who elected Barack Obama by a comfortable margin and gave the Democrats substantial gains in the House and Senate. What the country didn't get was any semblance of a well-functioning democracy. President Obama's postpartisan pitch fell flat, and the Tea Party movement pulled the GOP further to its ideological pole. Republicans greeted the new president with a unified strategy of opposing, obstructing, discrediting, and nullifying every one of his important initiatives. Obama reaped an impressive legislative harvest in his first two years but without any Republican engagement or support and with no apparent appreciation from the public. The anemic economic recovery and the pain of joblessness and underwater home mortgages led not to any signal that the representatives ought to pull together, but rather to yet another call by voters to "throw the bums out." The Democrats' devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they lost six Senate seats and sixty-three in the House, produced a Republican majority in the House dominated by right-wing insurgents determined to radically reduce the size and role of government. What followed was an appalling spectacle of hostage taking - most importantly, the debt ceiling crisis - that threatened a government shutdown and public default, led to a downgrading of the country's credit, and blocked constructive action to nurture an economic recovery or deal with looming problems of deficits and debt. [my emphasis]

Good policy is often good politics for the policy's supports. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes - far too often, actually - bad policy can be good politics for its supporters, especially in the short run.

But the Democratic Party's decades-long fondness for Reagan-lite positions that were both bad policy and bad politics for their own party is a different sort of thing.

Related: Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult" Contradicciones 12/05/2020

Nullificationist Republicans show no sign of "the fever breaking"

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote one of the best analyses yet of the still-current asymmetric partisan polarization in US politics, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012). Still current, but the problem has become far more intense, to the point of the Republican President inciting an armed mob to attack the Capitol building and attempt to murder members of Congress.

One of the insurrectionists favorite symbols, of course, is the Confederate battle flag. So it's interesting to note how Mann and Ornstein used the Confederate and segregationist concept of "nullification," which they applied to the Republicans' aggressive obstructionist tactics in slow-walking and blocking Obama's appointments, even in his first term:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [italics in original; my emphasis in Bold]

This is why continuing the 2009-style Democratic fantasies about Bipartisan harmony is so dangerous for the effectiveness of the Biden-Harris Administration.

Mann and Orstein wrote during the last year of the Obama-Biden Administration about the radicalism behind the new nullification as the Republicans applied it to the nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court (The Grim Reality of American Politics The Atlantic 03/17/2016):

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office. Both House and Senate have declined to recognize the budget the president submitted in January, refusing even to hold the customary hearings with the head of the National Economic Council and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And within an hour of the announcement of the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that the Senate would not recognize any nominee put forward by Obama—no vetting, no hearing, not even the customary individual meetings with Judiciary Committee Republicans. [my emphasis]

It's pointless and even counterproductive to speculate hopefully in the current moment about how they hope "the fever will break" on the Republican side without very substantive signs from Republicans themselves that they are changing course. The fact that a big majority of Republican House Representatives voted for the coup attempt even after the invasion of the Capitol is a sign the "fever" is raging right along. (John Bowden, The Republicans who voted to challenge election results The Hill 01/07/2021)

It would be appropriate for everyone to refer to everyone on that list with the description "seditionist" prefacing their names.

Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult"

Norman Ornstein appeared yesterday on the Mehdi Hasan Show talking about the authoritarian state of the Republican Party, Inside The Deep Roots of the GOP’s Ongoing Denial of Reality 12/05/2020:

He co-authored a 2012 book with Thomas Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It's only gotten worse since. Much worse, as Orstein discusses in that interview. (And, yes, he does say, "This is a cult, Mehdi.") Their book made me more intensely aware of how much the fact of asymmetric partisan polarization is a defining fact of politics in America now. And not just because the ideological center of gravity of both parties both moved to the right. But also because of the Republican Party far more aggressive and combative style in fighting for their own side.

As they said in the book, "Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier." Trumpism was a kind of "desublimation" that made even more raw and obvious what the Republican Party has become. Trump is a freakish manifestation of it. But he's not pursuing a fundamentally different political project than the authoritarian course that has been taken in recent decades.

I'm going to quote here a review of the book I did in Parties and government dysfunction in the US 03/15/2013:

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein attracted quite a bit of well-deserved attention last year for their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It has been much discussed and reviewed. I saw the two of them do a presentation based on the book last year, of which they did quite a few in the process of promoting the book.

They discuss the current toxic partisan environment in the national government in the US. And they rightly identified the main culprit, not relying on the lazy pseudo-centrist both-sides-are-to-blame truism of which the Beltway Village press are so fond:

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Their book offers a number of ideas of reforms that might be sensible and improve the general functioning of the federal government. And they make critical examinations of a number of popular explanations of the current widely-recognized problems. They argue, for instance, that the assumption that gerrymandering is responsible for party polarization as such doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. They argue that its "impact is relatively minor and marginal" on party polarization.

They also use a phrase "the new nullification" that may prove to be a useful term, though I'm still digesting it myself:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [emphasis in original]

They also mention a salient fact that is typically ignored entirely when Village pundits wring their hands at the incivility of all this partisanship: "for most of the past century, the parties were less internally unified and ideologically distinctive, and more coalitions in Congress cut across parties than is the case today." So, of course in that situation, ideologically divisive issues were often settled on a "bipartisan" basis. But that's something very different than the Village's fetish for bipartisanship as a goal in itself.

Still, Mann and Ornstein don't entirely avoid the peril inherent in focusing on process and institutional issues, which is failing to give full significance to the reality that content matters.

Bipartisanship or consensus isn't a good thing in itself. Ever. It may feel good, but it's never a good thing in itself in isolation from what action or lack thereof is being decided. Some of the worst decisions the American government has ever made were done so on a broadly bipartisan basis. The ending of Reconstruction in the South in the 1870s, for instance, in which Democrats and Republicans agreed to withdraw federal forces discontinue using federal forces against armed white terrorism and leave the laws unenforced, while white Democrats overthrew the democratic governments there by force and violence, and many states sustained segregation and un-Constitutional voter suppression laws against black citizens (which also affected poor whites) well into the 1960s.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in 1964 on a broad bipartisan basis, becoming the legal and political figleaf on which the Johnson Administration justified the full-blown escalation of the Vietnam War - an escalation he was elected in 1964 opposing.

The list could go on: the open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the rush bipartisan approval of the PATRIOT Act that same year. The debate in Congress over Old Man Bush's Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 may have been more nominally civil. But it resulted in a decision to authorize military intervention, a decision I supported at the time but in light of subsequent events and revelations about how the Bush I Administration made its case for war, I regard now as very much a bad one.

The debate over the Iraq War and the authorizing resolution in 2002 also passed on a bipartisan basis, though Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd opposed it intensely. The fact that it was bipartisan didn't make the decision any less destructive, irresponsible and reprehensible.

Mann and Ornstein devote their first chapter, "The New Politics of Hostage Taking," to the debt-ceiling fight in 2011, using it as example of how asymmetrical political polarization torpedoed a Grand Bargain, which they characterize this way: "What that produced was a year of hostage taking and wrangling in Congress, misdirected steps to deal with the deficit, and nothing whatsoever to remedy the public's greatest concern - chronic unemployment."

But what was the content of that Grand Bargain likely to have been? "Grand Bargain" basically means cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Very bad policy, a very bad idea. (See Bob Kuttner, The Grand Bargain We Don't Need Huffington Post 3/10/2013) And we know that the Democratic President was in full Heinrich Brüning mode, as he is again at this present writing. We know he offered up a large and very damaging increase of the Medicare eligibility age by two years. He was also pushing for using the "chained CPI" scam to cut benefits on current and future Social Security recipients.

And the whole debt-ceiling debate was about how much austerity to impose on the US economy that was then and still is now in a weak recovery, employment levels still a long way from the 2007 level and well-paying jobs even scarcer. All this while Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain were demonstrating dramatically and in real time how damaging austerity policies in the middle of a depression are.

So, while the debt-ceiling fiasco did illustrate the partisan and institutional dysfunctions that Mann and Ornstein describe, in that context a more successful partisan and institutional process would have produced a really bad set of policy decisions. We can distinguish between process and result. But they can't be treated in isolation from one another. And that's not only true for that particular incident.

But the thrust of the book is to point out real problems that block the functioning of healthy democratic processes in a major way. And they do point out the massively corrupting role of big money, which is intimately connected with policy outcomes. If wealthy donors dominate the political process, outcomes will be skewed in a way that favors the narrow interest of that class.

Mann and Ornstein are also not promoting some pseudo-centrist "postpartisan" or end-of-ideology perspective here. For instance, they write:

... beware of nonprofit political groups bearing independent presidential candidates and balanced, centrist tickets. Americans hate political parties in general but the parties are essential vehicles to represent their values and views and to give direction and purpose to government. A democracy cannot float above politics; politics - and parties - are critical components of our democratic DNA. Political groups promoting the siren song of transcending politics instead of working to change the dysfunctional behavior of those in politics and government suffer from their own democratic deficit and are more likely to play spoiler or produce an ungovernable administration than to remedy dysfunctional politics. [my emphasis]

Hillary Clinton and the lingering ideology of the Democratic Leadership Council

Hillary Clinton is still throwing shade on Bernie Sanders: Caroline Kelly, Clinton doubles down on Sanders criticism, warns that he's promising 'the moon' CNN 02/07/2020.

Which I'm starting to find amusing. Could it be that Hillary knows that her criticism will Help Sanders more than hurt him in the primary contest? And is therefore playing the famous "three-dimensional chess" with this to boost his prospects?

Still, it's hard to see how the comments of the leader who won the popular vote for the Presidency in 2016 is effectively grappling with the current state of American democracy:

When asked by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres if she wanted to address her prior remarks about the Vermont independent, Clinton noted that while she originally made them about a year and a half ago, "I have a pretty clear perspective about what it's going to take to win, and as I said earlier, that's what I think the key calculation for any voter has to be."

"You've got to be responsible for what you say, and what you say you're going to do," Clinton added. "We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can't deliver the moon, then that's going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can't trust each other." ...

On Thursday, Clinton followed up her comments on responsibility by pointing to health care, a key issue for Sanders, who is a well-known proponent of "Medicare for All." In October, Sanders said he doesn't need to come up with a detailed plan "right now" for how much his signature health care plan would cost individual Americans.

"I want quality affordable health care for everybody. ... But let's remember what's at stake. We have a current President who's trying to take away fundamental health care rights," Clinton said, referencing the Trump administration's support for a lawsuit looking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with preexisting conditions.

"So we can have a big argument about ideally what kind of health care we should want for everybody, because I'm on the front lines on that battle, but let's remember: If we don't win, people will lose what they have right now," she added. "So I just want everybody to understand how high the stakes are and to hold every candidate and every public office holder accountable for what they do or they don't do." [my emphasis]

I view those quotes as showing the extent to which Clinton is still fighting the DLC battles of the 1980s. Assuming the CNN quotes convey her comments fully enough there, what she seems to be saying is that not only should Democrats not even be talking about Medicare for All but instead should focus on the minimum goal of containing the damage the Trump Administration has already done to the health insurance system in the US.

This strikes me as a version of the Make American Boring Again message that is essentially one of mildly disturbed complacency.

Corporate Democrats generally aren't going to challenge drastic descriptions of the danger of the Trump Administration. But even during the Reagan years, Democrats had an advantage in national public opinion when it came to polls showing people were generally more attracted to Democratic positions than Republican ones. But the Democrats went into a defensive crouch in which they courted corporate cash more actively and they accepted Republican framing of issues from defense to fiscal conservatism to law-and-order. The corporate-centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was the chief organized expression of that political tendency.

But what at least as frustrating to Democratic activists as their centrist positioning on issues was their seeming unwillingness to fight for their own stated positions, in dramatic contrast to the steadily increasing zeal of the Republicans to fight for theirs.

Clinton's appeal to Democrats to Settle For Less that shows up in that article seems like a tired repetition of DLC centrism. Long after the DLC itself disbanded, which is did in 2011. (Ben Smith, The end of the DLC era Politico 02/007/2011)

And it's a reflection of the continuing asymetric polarization between the Democratic and Republican Party, with the former struggling to get past timid centrist and the latter having descended to an authoritarian party in a continuing process of radicalization. (See: Norman Ornstein, Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and Conservatives Are Worse The Atlantic 06/19/2014: Edward Lempinen interviewing Thomas Mann, Impeachment puts GOP’s divisive tactics center-stage, says Berkeley expert Berkeley News 12/17/2019)