Sweet Home Chicago
I
I’m in Chicago this weekend for the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. I always feel weird coming to these things; they are a good reminder off how much I feel like an outsider both on the Hill and in the academic world. On the Hill, I always feel like an academic, an imposter surrounded by sharp and knowledgeable staffers. Here, I feel like a Hill Rat, an imposter surrounded by incredibly smart academics.
I’ll keep this short and sweet today, if only because I can’t get embedded hyperlinks working on my iPad right now...
1. The president throwing aside tax policy yesterday is a bad sign for swing Republicans. Yesterday, President Trump literally tossed aside his prepared remarks on tax policy and spoke instead about immigrant rapists and the rigged 2016 election. This almost certainly caused high anxiety among swing-district House Republicans up for re-election in 2018. Particularly with subset of suburban swing-district Republicans, tax policy is where they want the election focused; they have a relative comparative advantage on that issue, and would almost certainly prefer to talk about that than about immigration or trade or conspiracy theories about past election.
Note that this can be the case even if immigration or trade or election conspiracy is the issue that most Republicans care about most, or even if one of those issues is the issue that helps Republicans maximize their national vote share in the upcoming election. People tend to forget that they goal of a political party facing a congressional election is emphatically not to maximize their national vote share; the goal is to maximize their seat share. Adding more votes in districts that you are already going to win (going from, say 62% of the vote to 68%) doesn’t help. The goal is to maximize the number of districts where you get the majority of the votes.
People intuitively understand this with the electoral college; presidential candidates should and do focus their attention on messages that resonate in states where they have a chance of winning but also a chance of losing. The distributed nature of a congressional election doesn’t changes this basic reality; the winning national message is the one that gains a few percentage points in the marginal districts. A message that gains a large percentage of points in a district you already have locked up at the expense of losing a marginal district is a terrible strategy.
In general, conservatives fare pretty well on immigration issues. A lot of voters have conservative view on immigration! But in swing districts in the 2018 election, vulnerable Republican incumbents would almost certainly prefer to talk about tax cuts. And my hunch is that this is correct strategy for the party, even if immigration could turn out more total votes or persuade more total independents.
2. Note that this phenomenon also holds for individual candidates. It is simply not the case that candidates for office are trying to maximize their vote share in an election. The goal is to maximize the probability of winning the election. If you already have 55% of the vote locked-down, there’s no direct reason to take a position that has a 1% chance of costing you the election, even if it has a 99% chance of improving your vote share to 65%.
This comports with the fundamentally risk-averse nature of incumbent politicians. A stable winning voter coalition is worth a whole lot more than marginal improvement in total vote share. Obviously, incumbents like to improve their vote share, and improving your vote share can have positive effects beyond the election across any number of important political dimensions. So it’s not nothing. But it is squarely not the primary goal.
3. The 2018 legislative session will be a messaging session. I read an article today that indicated the Koch network of Republican campaign money is upset at the prospect of a low-yield second session of Congress. That may be true, but I’m pretty sure they are not going to be able to do anything about it. Neither party has much incentive to cut a big deal—the Democrats in particular seem to be in no mood to hand the president or the GOP a legislative victory that shows competence or can be trumpeted in the Fall—and the Republicans don’t seem to have the appetite for a budget resolution that might unlock a reconciliation process that could usher through a large partisan bill of some sort. The NDAA will pass and a CR will hold over the FY2019 appropriations, but I suspect that will be all as far as major legislation is concerned.
So what is coming? A lot of messaging bills. A balanced-budget constitutional amendment looks poised to hit the House floor as early as next week. There’s talk of brining a bill to the floor to make the recent tax cuts permanent. Those are two reasonably nice messaging bills for the GOP. The former allows them to try to show some fiscal discipline street cred in the wake of the budget busting tax cuts and FY2018 appropriations. The latter may allow them to put red-state Democrats on the spot in the Senate, either winning the GOP a permanent extension of the tax cuts, or putting Senators like McCaskill, Donnelly, Tester, and Manchin on record (again) in opposition. I wouldn’t expect either gambit to even come close to passing.
One important structural aspect of such messaging action: the agenda-setting power of the majority in the House and Senate gives them a large advantage in these situations. The minority has no effective way to bring their own messaging items to the House floor (save the motion to recommit, which only provides an opportunity for one germane amendment) and it has become close to impossible to put an amendment in on the Senate floor this Congress. Whereas Senate rules allow non-germane amendments that were often used in the past by the minority to push messaging votes or create awkward procedural situations for the majority (think Ted Kennedy and his minimum wage amendments in the 90s), the increased use of filling of the amendment tree in recent Congresses has almost totally destroyed that possibility.
4. I wrote a blog post about impeachment and agenda control in the House. I’ve been recruited as an occasional blogger at the Yale Journal of Regulation, and I wrote my first post about the Question of Privilege in the House (http://yalejreg.com/nc/house-procedure-agenda-setting-and-impeachment/). In short, the tight agenda control the House majority has over legislation does not apply to impeachment resolutions, which any member can raise and get on the floor for consideration. There are some interesting implications of this, so please do read the post.
5. I do not think Scott Pruitt will survive his current scandals. One implication of the lack of agenda control over impeachment is that the House Dems could force at least a procedural vote on the impeachment of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt if he remains on the job into next. Such a move to bring an impeachment resolution against an executive branch appointee via a House Question of Privilege has very recent precedent—this is how the conservatives got the impeachment of the IRS commissioner on the floor in the 114th against the wishes of the leadership—and the House Republican leadership would need to ensure they could hold their own coalition together to win a vote to table such a move by the Democrats. That could cause problems—three House Republicans are already publicly against Pruitt—and at a minimum might be a nice messaging vote for the Democrats.bv
But I don’t think the Democrats are going to go that procedural route, and I don’t think it is going to matter, because I don’t think Pruitt is going to survive. The president did back him again yesterday, and the Wall Street Journal wrote an op-ed in his defense this morning, but my hunch is that the scandals are just too much and too many relevant GOP actors are going to see him as not worth the trouble, given that they can likely replace him with someone of similar competence and certainly of similar ideological outlook.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!