Can Washington Matter? The Case Against the Supercommittee

By Casey Armstrong, September 14th, 2011
President Obama presenting "The American Jobs Act" to Congress © Chuck Kennedy, 9/12/2011 | WhiteHouse.gov

There is a growing expectation that Washington may address the jobs crisis in a significant way with the possibility of major parts of “The American Jobs Act” becoming law, The New York Times reports today. A key to this could be the supercommittee, officially called the “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.” Casey Armstrong considers whether it is likely to be up to its bi-partisan tasks. The question of American governability is on the line. -Jeff

Last month, I speculated that the supercommittee had the potential to help drag our legislature into a more authentic form of bipartisanship, a bipartisanship based on principled mutual compromise in the tradition of Henry Clay. I expressed my belief that the makeup of the committee would determine its ability to affect change. In that respect, the prospect of the committee changing the status quo now seems bleak. There is great opportunity but the membership of the committee suggested that the opportunity will be missed.

The Committee on Deficit Reduction is nominally a “joint select committee.” Emphasis should be given to the “joint” nature. Select committees generally suggest, but don’t legislate. In the present supercommittee, I see the spirit of the conference committees that resolve contentions between Senate and House bills. “Going to conference” offers possibilities of compromise that would not have previously existed for the conferees in their respective chambers or standing committees. Conference rules state that “the conferees are given free reign to resolve their differences without formal instructions from their bodies.” Senate scholar Walter Oleszek quoted an anonymous Senate leader opining, “Conferences are marvelous. They’re mystical. They’re alchemy. It’s absolutely dazzling what you can do.”

In the Obama budget talks, posturing was encouraged by heightened visibility. Separate branches of government competed for authority. With the supercommittee, we move to what Erving Goffman called the “backstage.” The individual actors have more agency to shape the outcome than the participants . . .

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September 14th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pushing Back Against the Right’s Narrative on the Budget

By Richard Alba, July 20th, 2011
Wall Street Journal chart

The right, as has been frequently observed of late, has developed an “alternative-reality” view of how we have arrived at our current budget-deficit impasse, placing the blame squarely on the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. A runaway federal budget since 2009 is the key element in their story. In a July 15th editorial (“The Obama Downgrade”), The Wall Street Journal states this view succinctly:

“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”

The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:

At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.

If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door. But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 . . .

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July 20th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Weiner Follies: The Personification of Politics

By Gary Alan Fine, June 13th, 2011
Anthony Weiner in NYC, May 2011 © Tony the Misfit | Flickr

Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.

At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.

Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in . . .

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June 13th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,