FIVE POINTS: Meet the new year, same as the old year
UPCOMING PODCAST ALERT. We're recording a new episode of Congress, Two Beers on Wednesday and we are delighted that Julia Azari will be joining us as our first-ever guest. Julia is a super-smart scholar of the presidency and, more generally, American politics. And she's become a fixture of popular political analysis in 2017 with her incredibly prescient writing at FiveThirtyEight, Vox, and other political outlets.
You can subscribe to Congress, Two Beers In on iTunes here. And our RSS feed is here.
1. The congressional calendar has important implications. I wrote a blog post last week about the history of the old congressional calendar, which was a huge constitutional screw-up by the Framers that caused all sorts of problems prior to being fixed in the 20th amendment in 1933. I certainly recommend you read it. I'd like to add a few things here about how the current congressional calendar(s) affect the policymaking process.
Generally speaking, I don't think observers of Congress appreciate how much the structuring of time plays into the procedural strategies of Members, parties, and interests. Congress operates on a two-year constitutional calendar (with required annual sessions) that can be subdivided into work-periods/recesses, weeks, and days, all of which provide constraints and opportunities to strategic actors. Much has been written about the two-year period for the existence of any Congress---it creates a hard deadline for action and, more importantly, a time horizon by which actors tend to judge policy costs and benefits. If you propose a policy with both costs and benefits, you can help yourself if the benefits arrive in less than two years or the costs are pushed out beyond two years. Not rocket science.
But a lot less has been written about the implications of the subdivisions. Some, of course, are well-known. The desire of Members to be home on the weekends tends to structure congressional votes and committee action into the middle of the week, which in turn puts lobbyists in the Capitol on those days too, and forces leaders to think twice about holding votes on the weekends (and annoying members) if it can be avoided at all. Below this, however, there is a huge layer of strategic fieldcraft. For example, when I was an appropriations staffer, we tried very hard to schedule our bill for its full committee markup such that it was just before final floor votes on a getaway day. This ensured that members would want to complete the markup before floor votes (so they could leave town immediately after the floor) and thus would face a lot of peer pressure in the committee room not to offer amendments to our bill. And it worked. Surprisingly well.
In addition to the way the subdivisions affect legislative politics, Congress has also created a set of other statutory and chamber calendars that impact the policy process, such as the federal fiscal calendar, the congressional budget process calendar, and specific chamber rules that make certain procedures in order on certain days (such as suspension of the rules). The federal fiscal calendar (which runs from October 1 to September 30) is particularly interesting because it suggests annual legislation that cuts across multiple Congresses. That is, when appropriations are passed in the second session of a Congress, they are in effect as law for most of the first session of the following Congress, after an intervening election.
One twist to this, however, is that if you *don't* pass the appropriations on time in the second session, you might cede a lot of leverage over the funding of the government for the year. If the GOP doesn't complete the FY2019 appropriations (which are technically due by October 1) by the end of the calendar year, the Democrats may have the opportunity to win control of one chamber (or both) in the November elections and produce very different FY2019 appropriations bills in the spring. And while appropriations need some bipartisan agreement (to avoid a Senate filibuster), control of both chambers means control of a lot of the low level details that aren't the stuff of high-profile spending fights but are the stuff of governing policy changes.
Likewise, a party that can get its act together and finish spending bills on time can avoid this fate. But, of course, this is a strategic game, and if the Democrats find themselves highly likely to win Congress come September, they can try to reject spending deals in order to push the FY2019 appropriations past the start of the 116th Congress, or they can drive a harder bargain or a deal prior to the deadline.
2. I swear I only have a few paragraphs of thoughts about Oprah. Hans Noel summed up my initial thoughts on the Oprah-for-POTUS news:
The point being: there's no reason to believe a celebrity can be an effective POTUS, either in managing the executive branch, conducting foreign affairs, or adding marginal value to a party pursuing a legislative agenda. There just aren't a lot of policy or political reasons to want a complete amateur celebrity in office. We sort of knew that before Trump. And he has largely been confirmatory evidence.
But if that's the case, you might still support Oprah on electoral grounds. Maybe she has a huge comparative advantage (vs.other candidates) in the Democratic quest to beat Trump in 2020. And from a liberal point-of-view, even a hideously poor Democratic POTUS might very well be preferable to more Trump.
I'm pretty sure that argument is hideously wrong. In many possible 2020 scenarios---victories and losses---the Democratic candidate quality simply won't matter. Any reasonable candidate will sometimes win, and in other cases Trump will be unbeatable by any plausible candidate. The fundamentals simply matter too much; save for a terribly disqualifying candidate (i.e. Roy Moore), candidate effects in presidential elections are going to be small marginal effects.
Even when they do matter, it's hard to see why Oprah would have a comparative advantage. It's possible that she could out-Trump Trump as a spectacle candidate, and maybe that's worth something in this brave new world! But I'm less convinced than many that Trump has fundamentally changed American politics in that way. I suspect Trump-clone candidates (of all ideologies) will fare poorly in coming years, as they had in previous.
And the dangers of an amateur celebrity candidate are myriad. High up on the list is the lack of vetting. By the time someone runs for president via the traditional career path, they've survived a number of rounds of opposition research. Not true for amateurs. It's also unclear what a party would gain from blurring some of the main negatives president Trump brings to 2020; one reason Trump's approvals are so low is that many independents are unsure about his ability to do the job competently. A celebrity candidate would need some massive appeal to overcome the loss of that appeal to the voters.
I do not think Oprah will even entertain running for president. But I think Democrats currently contemplating it because of her sky-high name recognition and approval are being dangerously naive.
3. The GOP committee chair retirements are frustrating. Ed Royce announced yesterday that he will not seek reelection to the House this fall. That makes him the *seventh* House GOP committee chair that has decided not to return to Congress next year.
That's a huge number.
Royce, of course, was going to face a very tough race in CA-39, which voted 51-43 for Clinton in 2016 and has a Partisan Voting Index (PVI) of even. But a bigger issue is that Royce was about to be term-limited out of his chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.Under GOP conference rules, no member can serve for more than three consecutive terms (six years) as a committee chair.
That's a terrible rule, with predictably terrible consequences. It prevents members from building up true deep experience in a policy area, since they know they won't be in charge for long. Perhaps even worse, it reduces the power of chairmen, since other members and interest groups know they won't be around in the chair forever. Relatedly, it doesn't allow for anyone outside the leadership to build up a true base of political power within the committee system, the way chairs could prior to the rule change. This means that there are fewer members who have the clout and positioning to take on the leadership, in general, over anything.
In other words, it's working exactly as it was designed. Whatever the stated benefits of term-limits were for rotation in office and spreading around the power, the move was transparently an attempt by the Gingrich leadership to centralize power in the leadership and reduce the independent influence of the committee system. As I've written elsewhere, such centralization has some internal advantages for a majority party, but comes with significant costs, both inside Congress, and for Congress as an institution when competing with other branches for influence over public policy.
The GOP should repeal the policy.
4. Books about politics I'm reading right now. I have a ton of politics books on my plate right now:
I just read Achen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists. Loved it. Having grown up with a powerful city machine (in Albany, NY), I don't have a lot of patience for the progressive do-gooders who think "empowering people" through "democratic" reforms is the key to a better society. So I'm a soft touch for this one. But it's a great read for anyone stuck in that myth.
I read Wolff's Fire and Fury last weekend. It was ok. I don't really believe it at the details level, but the overall picture of the 2016 Trump campaign, transition, and early months was definitely interesting. Most notable to me is the universal belief inside the Trump campaign---and with Trump himself---that the campaign was garbage and that they were definitely going to lose, probably badly. That speaks to what I think is the biggest question about Trump:how much of his public persona is strategic, and how much is real? That it points to strategic is, for me, somewhat reassuring.
I'm reading Hans Noel, Political Ideologies and Political Parties. This is a masterful book, albeit quite academic. It takes on the basic question of how ideologies develop and how they come to intersect with political parties. Fascinating.
I just started Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, which is about rural voters in Wisconsin and opposition to the "liberal elite." This is a topic I am totally ignorant of beyond the surface level. Very excited.
I just started James Wallner, On Parliamentary War, which is a book I've long awaited and am very excited about. It's about Senate procedure, so be forewarned. But it looks great.
5. You must watch the autotuned Smells Like Teen Spirit video. Someone autotuned Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit into a major key, and the result is breathtakingly creepy. Stop whatever you are doing and watch this video, especially if you are between the ages of 35 and 50.
I don't know about you, but I had an extreme visceral reaction to seeing that. Part of me hated it. Part of me was simply dumbfounded. Part of me felt really eerie. But mostly it just made me sad. I had something of an instant nostalgic daydream as soon as the first chords hit; I was 14 in 1992 and I've seen that video 1000 times. But the combination of the utterly familiar video and the chords of the major key opening the song produced such an intense emotional feeling.
It was like watching a movie reel of my teen years, but with all the pain and disappointment and sadness washed out. I was in that movie Sliding Doors, and I had just found the soundtrack to the happier version of my youth. Even weirder, I would not at all have described myself as unhappy as a teenager. Did the video unlocked the sadness itself? Or that the times were just more generally sad than I thought? When Kurt hit the "BRING you friends" and the "bring" was up a half-step and cheerful, I almost lost it. The 90s sucked in so many ways, and I didn't even realize half of them until now.
Or, as my friend Nate put it, maybe the original song literally changed the world because it was written in a minor key:
Anyway, here's a nice music theory article about what's going on in the original Smells Like Teen Spirit, and how it relates to the major chord autotune version on a cultural level.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!