FIVE POINTS: A Recess is Not a Vacation
1. There's less than meets the eye with that "postpone the elections" survey.You probably saw some version of this headline from the Washington Post yesterday. A survey found that 47 percent of people who identified or leaned Republican would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump , suggested doing so until only eligible American citizens could vote. That's a pretty shocking finding, but there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about it.
First, The poll is a hypothetical.That's a disaster. As the article admits, if such a proposal were actually made by a POTUS, there were be a large and vocal set of elites, including many Republicans, who would be strongly opposing such a move. And that context would broadly shape public opinion. As John Zaller might say, this question did not exist in the analytical mind of any voter at any time except for the exact moment it was asked. Such blank slates are not where or how political beliefs are normally formed.
Second, the question is setup with a built-in elite cute, but no political context. If [a POTUS of your preferred party] suggested we need to take [extreme measure X], would you support it? So for many peole this just becomes a proxy for "Do you strongly support the President?" and we already know that about 20-25% of the country does indeed strongly support President Trump. This is a general problem with political opinion polling---they can easily become nothing more than a census of party ID.
Finally, we don't have the historical baseline for this sort of question. The reason this question is scary is the implicit idea that such beliefs are a new development, and that new development correlates with a destabilizing of our democracy. But if half of the co-partisans of the POTUS in American history would have always answered this way, well, that's just a signal of kooky citizens or a stupid poll. What's the truth about this? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure you can get some sizable percentage of partisans to say anything, even if they don't really believe it. We have endless data on people thinking Obama was a Muslim from Kenya. There are numerous polls showing huge numbers of Democrats thought Bush was in on 9/11. And so on. Proving that the norms of democracy don't exist at the survey-expressed voter level is definitely scary, but it's been done repeatedly.
In sum: I'm not saying you shouldn't be worried about the rise of an illiberal political ideology in America. I'm saying that this survey is almost certainly very weak evidence of it.
2. What I'm Reading Next Week At the Beach.
David Bird, Winning Duplicate Tactics
Nick Soulsby, I Found My Friends: An Oral History of Nirvana
3. It's Not Just About Votes, and Even Votes Aren't Just About Votes. I've tweeted extensively about how a focus on roll-call votes obscures fissures between POTUS and the congressional Republicans. Both non-voting official action, as well as unofficial public-sphere actions of Members of Congress serve to constrain, influence, and oppose a co-partisan POTUS, often in ways that are more important than roll-call votes, and usually in ways that are less obvious and/or visible. From a Neustadtian perspective, presidential power---the ability to influence outcomes in DC relative to other presidents---depends largely on building and maintaining a strong professional reputation in DC and a high standing in public opinion, and right now Trump's sum total of those two things is probably worse than any first-year elected POTUS in history, with only unelected Andrew Jackson and John Tyler in contention for a worse relationship with their own party elite.
But there's another side to how roll call votes obscure our focus that is much more related to the votes themselves. As Richard Fenno explained a generation ago, one of the chief representational roles of Members of Congress is to explain to their constituents back home how they voted. And part of the explanation process is invariably an attempt to frame the very nature of the issue at hand in the roll-call vote, and the politics of how the vote went down. On the Hill, this is simply called optics. It's basically impossible to spend a day in Congress without hearing the optics of that are terrible or what are the optics gonna be like on that? It's not a stretch to say, as Fenno does, that the decision on how to vote is in large part inseparable from a decision about how to explain.
In fact, that's what a lot of Members of Congress are doing right now. They're explaining what is going on in Washington to the constituents. And disabuse yourself of the idea that recess is some sort of vacation. For many Members, the days are as long or longer in their district as they are in Washington. In a lot of cases, DC is the easy and fun part of the job. You get to make public policy, you get to influence the president or the executive branch, you get treated like a public official of moderately high standing. Back home, you often get to stand at a county fair and get yelled at by people who think you are ruining their lives. And you just have to take it. As the old joke goes, every Member dreams of the day he can go to grocery store and just tell someone to fuck off when they come over to complain to him or ask him to do something.
Now, as Mayhew noted in The Electoral Connection, individual Members of Congress really don't have to win on a roll-call vote; they usually just have to vote the right way. Members who vote with their district have a *much* easier time explaining a vote---even a losing vote---than a Member who votes against their district. This is one reason Members, even of opposing parties, can be so chummy on the floor during an important vote; they aren't really in competition to win the vote, they are all just trying to vote the right way.***
But while this logic holds at the individual level, it doesn't hold for leaders or parties. They are expected to win. Voting the right way is not good enough. Not only may they tarnish their party brands and create situations where voters seek to punish the party in the next election, but they may also personally be punished by their respective caucuses in Congress. And so when things go wrong, as they did for the GOP on health care, the optics can devolve into Fenno-style explaining among leaders about who is to blame. To wit:
This is in response to Senator McConnell's own blame game shot at trump. This is all somewhat unusual because it is (1) happening out in the open on Twitter; (2) occurring under a unified government. But it is not unusual for parties and leaders to spend as much time crafting and delivering explanations for political outcomes as they do crafting actual policy legislation. And that's not a bad thing; representational government more or less demands that politicians organize into parties and that parties mediate politics for the public. It's just that in this instance, it's happening among leaders within a party, instead of the manner we are all used to: between the two parties. Over to Jonathan Bernstein with a good analysis of why Paul Ryan is the winner here. The upshot, however, is that issues don't exist in a vacuum. And the ill-will created across any number of dimensions here can come home to roost on future issues, perhaps sooner rather than later.
***This is somewhat less true that it used to be. Now that the parties are more nationalized, a bad party brand has a bigger effect on swing-district Member outcomes. Of course, this is tempered by polarization reducing the number of swing voters, so it is not quite as big a deal as it looks. In essence, Members in swing districts still have little control over their fate when national winds are blowing against them. So they still, as Mayhew suggested in the days of little polarization/nationalization, just try to control what they can control. Which largely still isn't the party reputation or major legislative outcomes.
4. It's Totally Fine Mike Pence Is Making 2020 Contingency Plans. Honestly, he'd be crazy not to be getting the machinery in order. Any number of scenarios he could find himself in that he doesn't want to be caught flat footed: the higher than average chance Trump doesn't run in 2020, the higher than average chance Trump runs and is knocked out early in the invisible primary, and the LBJ '68 scenario of Trump getting clocked in an early primary and dropping out. And this doesn't even count the (remote) possibility Pence could straight up challenge Trump for the nomination.At any rate, Pence needs to collect resources now. And while it obviously is a little awkward and probably needs to be denied, if Pence doesn't put together the financial and political network for a campaign, he could easily box himself out. And he'd be one of the most experience and qualified candidates the GOP would have in a Trump-free 2020.
And don't get drawn into the bad take that campaigns start too early nowadays. First, they always started early, it's just now there are official things you need to do to raise money, so it's more visible. Second, a long drawn-out primary season and invisible primary seasons vets candidates thoroughly and prevents parties from making bad choices. Before you say "But Trump!" please realize that something like a national primary day would help candidates like Trump. It might be better to return to the party bosses and a closed convention system, but if you want this in the hands of the people and interests in a primary system, the long campaign is best.
5. Congressional Capacity. There's a new study out by the Congressional Management Foundation that surveys senior congressional staff about congressional capacity, and it's more or less appalling. Only 15% of senior staff in Congress are satisfied with staffing, only 11% think Congress had adequate capacity, only 20% think Members and staff have a good understanding of Congress's role in American democracy. Nobody in teh survey thinks Congress has enough money to get the staff it needs to effectively do oversight. Anyway, here's Lee Drutman with some further thoughts on the study and it's implications.
This stuff absolutely is important, and it has to be seen through a separation of powers lens. You could read my CRS primer on the topic, but here's the background you need: in short, our separation of powers systems assigns different political roles to the different branches of government, but those roles are vague, overlapping, and interrelated. So while some matters of power disputes between Congress and the President in our system are purely constitutional law---legal issues for the Court to decide---the vast majority of contests over power take place at the political level in the public sphere. Presidents make political moves to augment their power---by asserting authorities they may or may not have and building public support for them, and by challenging similar encroachments from other branches. They start wars without authorization, they withhold documents from Congress, they stretch the interpretation of statutes. Congress does the same. They subpoena documents they normally couldn't get, they create agencies headed by non-presidential appointees, they setup legislative vetoes. And fights start. In most cases, there is no referee beyond public opinion. And so the actions of each branch today affect the future balance of power between them.
The rub is twofold: first, Congress is in a much tougher spot than the President in trying to defend its power. Presidents are unitary actors, and most presidents have noted after leaving office the immense sense of responsibility they felt to maintain the power of the presidency. Not so in Congress. Individual members may not feel the responsibility to defend their institution, and even those who do man not feel like they have any ability to do so. And cross-pressures are constantly attacking them: public policy goals (supporting POTUS war powers because they believe in the war aims), partisan goals (not wanting to embarrass a co-partisan POTUS or hurt their party by sinking legislation that decreases congressional power), and electoral goals (running "against Congress" in their reelection campaigns) all conflict with the goal of maintaining or enhancing institutional power. This collective action problem strongly hints toward power drifting toward the President, absent concerted efforts by Congress to maintain it.
Second, resources matter. In any political fight between the branches in the public sphere, information is power. If your branch can collect, analyze, and disseminate more high quality information, you win. It's often that simple. And that's capacity. If Congress wants to investigate the executive branch, it needs money for staff. If Congress wants to have independent economic numbers from CBO so it doesn't have to trust the numbers coming from the President's team in OMB, it needs to pay for it. And the bottom line is that the President has tons of resources. Not only can he draw on the entire executive branch, but he's got close to 2,000 staffers in the EOP who are there to help him build a public information case for why his policies---and his ideas for power arrangements---are correct. And he also has the media spotlight.
The rub, of course, is that Congress provides this for him. Once upon a time (1933), there were only about a dozen staffers at the White House. And even today, Congress can turn the lights off down there any time they want; POTUS has no constitutional right to staff or a house or a phone to call our allies from. But of course we want the President to have advisers and be able to manage the government effectively, so with the growth of the executive branch in the 20th century, Congress gave it to him. And in response to the imbalance they created, Congress has taken steps to beef up its own capacity, so they aren't completely outgunned. In both 1946 and 1970, Congress passed laws significantly increasing their staffing and resources. They also beefed up their non-partisan capacity, augmenting CRS and creating CBO in direct response to economic number fights with Nixon.
But times have changed. Staffing cuts in 1995 reduced House committee staffing sharply, and non-partisan support agencies are at a local nadir. There are people yelling and screaming to beef Congress up or face all sorts of consequences, even beyond POTUS sapping away power in public fights: uninformed legislating and/or domination of information by lobbying groups, lack of oversight of executive branch agencies, demoralization and inability to retain good staff when they want to be here, and the shift in power away form individual members and committees toward leadership. It's all related, and there are lots of good things you can read about it. I'd just make three practical point.
First, it's *really* hard to get Congress to spend money on itself. It's certainly not the case that members don't want more staff; I've never met a member who wouldn't love to have more staffers and be able to pay them better. But voters hate when Congress spends money on itself. They can't stand it. And so there's a massive downward democratic pressure on the Hill to never take any vote that can be seen or spun as even remotely personally greedy. This come up over and over again with Member pay. For much of the 20th century, Members only got sporadic pay raises; no one would vote for it. Then in 1989 an automatic COLA system was put in place so that no more votes would ever have to be taken. That worked for a while, but in the last decade, it has now become the norm to *block* that pay raise with a vote. And not voting to block the pay raise is now seen as deadly. And this sort of thing goes for staff, fixing the crumbling Capitol complex, and anything similar. If you live in a swing district, you've seen the palm cards in the mail: for all the talk about the nationalization of elections, at my house in VA-11, the last week of the campaign is mailer after mailer about who raised their own pay. It's a problem. You wan't to double the staff on the Hill? Try telling a Member we'll need a new building to house them, and the price tag starts with a B. Good luck.
Second, all of this isn't unrelated to polarization. Throughout the democratic world, there are really two different kinds of legislatures, call them arena legislatures and transformative legislatures. Arena legislatures are just battlegrounds. Policy development and political negotiation occur in other institutions, such as the parties and the executive branch, and the legislature is just the location where those policies are put in place. This is how many parliamentary systems operate: parties produce platforms to win elections and develop policy internally, often guided by a strong executive leadership team, and then they pass the policies at the legislature and execute them in the ministries. Transformative legislatures, like the U.S. Congress, serve as institutions that themselves mediate the political outcomes. Policies are developed internally, altered or rejected, and ultimately produced through negotiation and compromise within the institution. These types of legislatures are not rubber-stamp arenas; and as such, they require resources to operate.
But there are those who would prefer America have an arena legislature. There is a long strain of American political thought, dating to Woodrow Wilson, which posits the transformative Congress as an impediment in the modern world. What Wilson wanted was disciplined, parliamentary-style parties, led by the President, who could formulate, pass, and implement policy by overcoming the slog and gridlock and compromise a transformative legislature produces. And that brings us to today: we don't have parliamentary-style parties, but we are perhaps close than we have ever been. Polarization has given us discipline and strong leaders; the elections have become more nationalized around issues, and the parties are more likely to have a majority that knows what it wants going into a new Congress. All of these things have incentivized shifts away from capacity and toward the arena legislature. Strong parties don't want committees with independent resources and veto power, they don't want Members getting information on their own, and they certainly don't want oversight of their President. And so they go the Wilsonian route, eschewing capacity in favor of streamlined party efficiency.
It can't work. Well, it can't work optimally. Our constitutional system just puts too many hurdles in the way, starting with the mechanism that can create divided govenrment, which totally blows up the Wilsonian dream. But it's important to understand how polarization and capacity are at odds with each other. Trying to blow up CBO is bad for Congress in the separation of powers system, but you can see why it's useless in the context of a party operating in a parliamentary, arena-legislature mindset. If you are a fan of congressional power, there's an allure of the polarized partisan model. But it's ultimately a recipe for a hollowed-out institution, and a recipe for stronger Presidents.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!