Paul Waldman ably describes the two most common fallacies pundits and politicians use to explain how Democratic presidents can get stuff done in Washington. One can be called “the Bernie Sanders fallacy.” It involves leading “a grass-roots movement so powerful that it would force Republicans in Congress to vote for things they despise such as single-payer health care and free college.” It’s a manifestly absurd campaign promise and it really shouldn’t even qualify as an aspiration–because it’s delusional. The Republicans will not vote for a progressive vision for America, let alone a Democratic Socialist one. No amount of citizen pressure could ever convince them otherwise.
The second fallacy can be called “the John Hickenlooper fallacy,” after the former Denver mayor and Colorado governor who just announced his candidacy for president. In this scenario, you can convince a sufficient number of Republicans to vote for your agenda by having a respectful dialogue with them.
“When I come into office, I would go to Mitch McConnell to his office and I would sit down with him and say, “Now what is the issue again?” and we would talk and I would continue to speak back to him — it sounds silly, right? But this works, this is what I did with the suburban mayors, and they hated the city of Denver. You go to any metropolitan area in the country, the arguments between the big-city mayor and the suburban mayors, they’re almost endless. We’re the one place where this has gotten done, and I think it’ll work in Washington.”
As Waldman correctly points out, this is every bit as ridiculous as the Bernie Sanders fallacy. Mitch McConnell would only agree to talk policy with a Democratic president if he could use it to better understand how to crush that president’s priorities. There is absolutely no advantage in telling McConnell what your fondest hopes are, or even what you deem minimally necessary. If you can outfox him, then maybe you can get some things done, but there is no way he will ever lend you a hand. His only interest is in thwarting you and making you a one-term president.
This is why there is so much talk in progressive circles about doing away with the legislative filibuster in the Senate. There is approximately zero chance of the Democrats winning 60 seats in the Senate in 2020, so the Republicans will be able to filibuster almost all legislation. That means that there will be almost no legislation. There are already eleven billion people who are either running or seriously considering running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and not a single one of them has a different plan to overcome this obstacle.
The only way to pass progressive legislation in Congress is to do it without any Republican votes. But that is not how Congress works. Congress includes the Senate, and the Senate requires sixty members to overcome a legislative filibuster.
There are two things that will not happen between now and Inauguration Day, 2021: The Senate Republicans won’t become responsive to citizen pressure or presidential cajoling, and the Democrats will not get enough votes in the Senate to end a filibuster on their own.
Any presidential candidate who promises to accomplish anything legislatively needs to explain how they’ll go about overcoming this problem. They’ll need a better answer than the ones Sanders and Hickenlooper have provided thus far.
This post reminded me of the 10 word answer conversation from an episode of The West Wing for some reason
Ha, ha! It’s so silly that they think those things will actually work!
It’s almost as if they’re poetry, not prose.
What I don’t get is this: yesterday, Boo wrote a post about the stupidity of Republicans. Utterly true. I couldn’t agree more.
And yet … the majority of Republican voters are smart enough to understand that “I’m going to build a big beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it” is not actually going to happen. We think that’s a big gotcha: he said Mexico will pay and they won’t! Hahaha.
Well, joke’s on us. They don’t give a shit. Most of them never gave a shit. They know what an applause line is. They understood the purpose of that statement, and the power behind it–which has fuckall to do with building an actual wall.
What Trump was building wasn’t a wall it was a movement that used a dumbfuck promise to deliver the reallass result two Supreme Court justices (so far), 80 other life federal judges, the undermining of our international alliances, and the decimation of the our government.
And we’re over here chortling, “Is Mexico paying now?” No. We are. I know I go on about this, but it’s like talking to a Vulcan. “Why did they all say they are Spartacus? They are not all Spartacus. 5 pinnochios.”
Are Democratic voters as smart as Republican voters?
Let’s say that I grant you this.
The GOP said blah blah blah but really meant Supreme Court justices and deregulation and filibuster-proof tax cuts.
Okay, so when the Dems say blah blah blah, what do they really mean?
Because they really mean blah, blah, blah, and that’s bullshit.
If you define “Democrats” as limited to Hickenlooper and other moderates, then yes. Their entire bipartisan B.S. is just “blah, blah, blah, let’s all agree to join hands and sing Kumbayah.” And magically, this will span the gap.
Hickenlooper suffers from the MSM delusion of the “reasonable Republican” which holds against all evidence that Republicans are just waiting for a “credible partner” who will give the big middle finger to the Democratic base and negotiate with the GOP to “get things gone.”
This was stupid when Obama tried it in 2008, but at least he had the excuse that there wasn’t 8 years of evidence that it wouldn’t work. There is no such excuse now.
This is the biggest reason why Hickenlooper will be a short lived candidate. The only people who like his message are media hacks. There’s no constituency in the Democratic party for such nonsense in 2020.
What the Democratic base wants is someone who will crush Trump and then turn him over to Federal prosecutors to be imprisoned. NOT someone who will “reach across the aisle to get things done.”
However, the idiot “bi-partisans” in the media will try and prop up his candidacy if they can. They just can’t.
So let’s just dump Biden, Klobochar, Sanders and the filibuster. Anyone else?
It’s a start.
(checks list) Brissot and Hebert?
So let’s dump Biden, Klobochar, Sanders and the filibuster. Anyone else?
DeLaney. In fact, he was the very first person to declare for president.
. . . even if its implications may not be entirely welcome.
historically, in American politics, how many candidates have won by talking about what they won’t be able to do?
I want to know what a candidate would like to do. I might have to be adult enough to accept that they won’t do all of it. But I want to hear, for example, that universal health care is the goal even if they can’t tell me tonight how they’ll pass it or pay for it.
To me it’s not the promise….it’s when they wag their finger, and then use farts to squeek out how their opponents just don’t have what it takes to govern.
Once they start to break wind, they’re just trolls.
.
My advice is to learn not to want this.
I mean, yes, you want to know where candidates stand and what they think on a broad array of issues. But you don’t need a whole lot of that if it cannot translate into reality.
Democrats need to compete for votes so they are going to make promises, but you should not be an eager consumer of bullshit. A Democratic president can make good appointments, reinvigorate science and health investment, repair foreign relations, fight for priorities in the budget, and more. But there aren’t passing sweeping legislation on anything in their first two years. They just aren’t.
If we accept what you’re saying, the US is a failed state.
That’s basically true. The federal government was intentionally designed to be cumbersome and inefficient. It was designed to give disproportionate power to agrarian states and the slave-based economy, and the method for amending the Constitution was designed to be exceptionally cumbersome. Take away the Bill of Rights and the amendments passed right after the Civil War while the Confederate states were unable to block them, and we’ve had only about a dozen amendments in 230 years.
I mean that’s all fine, but Booman telling us that we need to accept the filibuster and unanimous consent rules of the Senate is to tell us that we do cannot govern. However, he’d apparently rather temper people’s expectations with these points than accept the conclusion that the US is a failed state.
In other words, there is nothing more demoralizing to me than that. It is to tell us that there is no point in fighting for anything, mathematically speaking. We will never get 60 votes in the Senate. Never, at least for the foreseeable future. I have hard times seeing 50 at times, but that is at least possible and southern states like Georgia and Texas provide new avenues.
Why do you think I am grumpy all the time?
But we don’t necessarily need to respect the unanimous consent rules. I don’t think it’s worth it to get rid of them, but that just leads me into a deeper conversation that will demoralize you.
If you want some short-term hope, fight to get rid of the legislative filibuster. It will be a requirement for anything better than Obama’s last six years.
At this point, I’ll take Obama’s last six years as a basic period of triage and recovery, but I lost short-term hope on Election Day 2016.
. . . you’re not paying attention.
THe reconciliation route to legislation may be the only route to getting legislation passed. There’s also the need for the next Democratic president to pound the message that the GOP is destroying the country and that, if Democrats can’t get and maintain a Senate majority, even the red states are doomed. Meanwhile, climate change will wreak ever more havoc pushing the need for change.
And?
How could we not be a failed state with this president?
We failed in the most spectacular fashion in recorded history, and with less excuse than any other comparable examples.
We are utterly bankrupt and bereft of dignity, credibility or capability.
Can we come back?
I certainly hope we can, but not on a vehicle fueled by ponies and rainbows.
I just find it utterly bizarre to care about electoral politics if you think we are a failed state. Revolution or nihilism seems a better use of time.
The truth is that none of the senators are being honest about the filibuster and unanimous consent. Because they’re Senators! Sanders and Gillibrand have discussed these issues outside of their presidential ambitions. I don’t know if the calculus has changed in their minds that they’re now resigned to bullshit.
The peculiar thing about all these Senators saying they are not for ending the legislative filibuster is that (supposedly) in 2013 the Democratic caucus was only a few votes short of a proposal to substantially cut back the filibuster and the filibuster was “saved” by the votes of a few long term Senators like Levin (now retired). Presumably several of the current crop were for the reforms.
Who knows. Some (including Sanders) say we had 50 votes for the public option through reconciliation in 2009-2010. I think it’s possible, but when I add the votes in context of 2009 it’s hard to get to 50 (but imo if you pushed it, it was possible). You never know though until the gun has a loaded bullet in the chamber, much more difficult when you’re playing with live ammunition.
They’re not going to make any progress IF they stick with the filibuster. They can get rid of it at any point they want to.
If they want to pass any legislation to address any of their priorities then they will have to do something about the filibuster.
Wow. Seriously?
“Learn to not want” things like Medicare For All when people are still going bankrupt from medical bills all over the country?
Uh, no. I was not born into a wealthy Princeton community, so I cannot afford to “not want” things that will prevent my financial ruin in the future. I’m really sorry if that’s inconvenient for people who are comfortable enough not to worry.
I don’t mean that you shouldn’t want a universal health care system for the United States. I mean you should not want your Democratic candidates for office to go out and promise you that they will deliver this if elected. They will not.
They may in the future. We had 60 votes in the Senate for five minutes and used it to pass ObamaCare. We could certainly get 60 votes again at some point in the future, but not in 2020.
Alternatively, we could get rid of the legislative filibuster, in which case our main obstacle would be moderate Democrats representing vulnerable states and districts. They would prevent Medicare For All in 2021-22 even if the Dems win enough seats to barely take control of the Senate. But they might come around at some point in the next decade.
It’s not an impossible dream, but it’s not something you should want a candidate to promise they can deliver.
And if they are promising it, then you should ask them what the mechanism will be. Are they getting rid of the filibuster? Are they going to use some kind of leverage I haven’t considered?
If the answer is either that the people will rise up and frighten the Republicans into supporting it, or that the candidate will work it all out with Mitch McConnell, then consider that to be a bunch of smoke getting blown up your ass.
Also, I don’t mind taking a shot for being born into a privileged family, relatively speaking, and raised in an elite environment. But I spent a lot of time uninsured because I couldn’t afford health insurance. For a while, I was getting subsidies through Obamacare. Now I have employer-provided health care, but my dental bills are bankrupting me. So, I am not arguing from a position of indifference here.
Thanks for the reply. I know the Princeton thing was a cheap shot and I don’t know you or your life’s hardships, but when I read posts like this about how things like Medicare For All just aren’t gonna happen cause Republicans will say no or because we don’t have some 100% perfectly-thought out plan I can’t help but think to myself “This is a person who doesn’t have to worry about insurance. This must be a person who is very financially comfortable if they are so willing to write off concrete material benefits for the working class. This person sounds like they’re critical of M4A because they are more concerned about wealthy people having to switch plans than they are about the millions of Americans being ground up by the for-profit healthcare system. This person is actively arguing against things that I (and the working class) desperately need to have a decent life.”
Is that fair? Hell no. But I can’t help but get a real “let them eat cake” vibe from the centrist wing of the party when it comes to issues like this.
I do agree that it’s important to have a real plan for something like universal healthcare, especially if you’re going to upend a previously privately-run system. But yes, I absolutely do want to be promised that shit. I understand that despite all of our best efforts it still might not happen, that the opposition to something like M4A is truly immense. It doesn’t matter. “Maybe we can do something in the future if we have 60 votes… maybe” is not a winning soundbyte.
I would rather Dems err on the side of over-promising, rather than continually losing elections with milquetoast candidates who promise nothing. Again, thanks for the reply.
Republicans aren’t the only voters who want to be lied to. Politicians understand this, which is why they lie so much.
But there are real costs when you operate that way. It does not make for happy people in the long run. It makes it harder to govern. It increases the overall distrust of government and institutions.
It’s one thing to argue that the base needs to be fired-up and inspired. It’s another to actually want to have smoke blown up your ass because you think it connotes some genuineness.
Why are you speaking as if campaigning for universal healthcare is inherently deceptive? Every other first-world country manages it in some form or another. This is not pie-in-the-sky.
Dem bloggers often write about how Dems are too wonky and fail to connect with voters on a gut level. Right now you’re telling me that the way to argue for universal healthcare NOT to demand politicians support the actual policy, but to support politicians who want to do things like end the filibuster that way down the line maybe The Nice Things will become politically “realistic”? Is that really going to connect with voters who are hurting, especially people who don’t pay attention to political blogs?
Trump got elected promising the ban Muslims and build a wall paid for by Mexico. It fired up his base. It wasn’t nuanced. It wasn’t wonky.
But he won.
Right?
Isn’t that what you want? To win?
There are obvious problems with campaigning this way, and it is not the only way to win. You can tell people quite honestly that you will fight to improve health care and deal with climate change. You don’t have to tell them a bunch of bullshit or attack people for lack of commitment who are only telling folks the truth.
Honestly, though, arguing about who loves MFA the most is a lot like arguing about whether to repave the driveway while the house is on fire. We have a country in cardiac arrest. Let’s talk about defibrillators before we talk about passing a big health care overhaul through this piece of shit Congress.
This attitude is baffling to me. I think the exact opposite is needed. We need them to fight like hell for it and then lose the fight. Not preemptively surrender by compromising out of the gate, not by proposing increments. Maybe not take the vote but maybe so.
Thats how you get your side fired up, and that’s how you prove you are on the same side as your base on the issue for real. Then you use them to crush the traitors and threaten the other side’s weaker members. Whats alternative? Preemptive demoralization? Because thats what your way leads to. Human beings are emotional actors, not rational.
There’s something to be said for going big or going home. Hell, I’d be happy with a candidate advocating for building a beautiful universal healthcare system that would be paid for by all those lovely Cayman Island accounts where the 1% launder their money. Even if it does not quite work out as promised, I have an idea of what that person is going to go to the mat for once in office. This coming election will be a sanity election, yes, but it is also still going to be another change election, as conditions for many of us who do scrape by (barely) are worse now than they were even a couple years ago.
Incremental solutions dont help that much with the scope of the problems we face in yerms of seeing an impact in our lives. Knowing those who aspire to lead us grasp the magnitude of the changes required is much more inspiring and hopeful than someone who appears eager or content or resigned to remain with the status quo.
“…the people will rise up and frighten the Republicans…”
Ok, now we’re on the same page. Because this is truly the only thing that is going to break this spell. The question is what form will the frightening take? Ballot box, natural catastrophe, economic meltdown, rage induced, physical confrontations, law enforcement crackdown???
Don’t underestimate the anger in our land.
“Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.”
– Tim Wu – a law professor at Columbia
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/oppression-majority.html
I would rather fight to rid us of the filibuster than walk away and accept whatever the moderate Dems and bi partisan hacks can get us. I think that way leads to zero imrovements. I can never vote for Trump but say a word about bi partisanship and 60 votes don’t expect a nickel from me. That’s plain enough. In fact I want my candidate to say it up front. No guessing where they stand. Maybe the real fight is to remake the Democratic Party.
I believe there are significant improvements that can be made to the ACA through budget reconciliation if we get 50 Dem senators. Also roll back the tax cuts for wealthy and corporations and redirect them. Republicans have shown us how much wiggle room is in that process.
If the Dems get the presidency, keep the House and get 50 Senators (I know, not a given by any means) they CAN pass sweeping legislation. They can trash the filibuster, pack the supreme court, add PR and DC as states and institute the Wyoming rule to expand the House. The question its if they WILL. If the national mood is angry enough, they might. Power isn’t something one saves for a rainy day. Use it or lose it.
Lincoln and third term Roosevelt.
Well sure, it would be great if Democrats could take the Senate with clear agenda and then blow up the filibuster to achieve that agenda, but the Senate map, while certainly better than last time, doesn’t look that spectacular. Most likely, if they do take the Senate, the margin will be a couple votes- Hello Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and (perhaps) Doug Jones. It will be tough to get any of these Senators on board on any sort of progressive agenda. Let’s face it, the Senate just sucks. But maybe a solid victory by a Democratic candidate with a clear agenda in their states might convince them to vote with their party. We can hope.
Also, expecting Senators from the minority party with uncertain prospects of retaking the Senate in 2020 to advocate for dumping the filibuster might be a bit much at this point in time. But still, if a Democratic candidate runs on, say- Medicare for all, they should be clear that if it takes killing the filibuster to implement it, they would support dumping the filibuster. It’s worth a try. Hopefully, this bunch of presidential candidates are very much aware that they will have a very short period of time to actually enact legislation that noticeably improves peoples lives before the billionaires roll out “Tea Party v2.0” or whatever other nonsense they come up with with their limitless funding and anti-democratic agenda. And I completely agree, any Democratic president will get absolutely no support from Republicans in congress.
Also, expecting Senators from the minority party with uncertain prospects of retaking the Senate in 2020 to advocate for dumping the filibuster might be a bit much at this point in time.
The real task is finding which ones are open to dumping the filibuster while publicly saying very little. Why? Because the minute the cat is out of the bag, the media and the GOP will cry like the whiny brats they are. So the only real solution is to do it last minute. If Senate Democrats had any sense.
Yeah, but then there’s the Beto O’Rourke approach, which is to knock on the door of all 150 million households in the United States and say he just wants to listen because he knows he’s not the smartest guy in the country. This listening tour will then build irresistible momentum for …something. Not sure what, because Beto has no definable ideological stance, but that doesn’t matter. For details, see the latest diary at the Beto O’Rourke Fan Club section of this website, brought to you by Arthur Gilroy and his sock puppet.
O’Rourke does seem flaky, but he does not deserve to be blamed for AG’s silliness in his name.
Similarly Sanders takes too much flack for the dumbshits that stan for him.
Trolls like AG are just trying to poison people’s opinions against anyone to the left of [checks notes] Donald Trump. No reason to let them influence you.
. . . too kind!
I am not AG’s sockpuppet. LOL
Sanders and Hickenlooper aren’t getting the nominations, so who gives a rip what either of them say?
Maybe the best we can do is hope RBG holds on long enough to retire during a Democratic administration and repair as much of the damage done by this administration as possible and maybe even pass a few laws to keep this sort of thing from happening again. Maybe we can make progress on the State level, turn a few more of those houses and wait for Texas to turn blue.
Whinging about not getting this or that version of progressive agendas passed is a waste of time. We have to set the Republic right asap and fix things like the EPA, CFPB, the State Department, repair our damaged global reputation, focus on climate change, rooting out Russians and their ilk…lots to do to just claw back to where we were when Obama left office. I’d like to see a candidate talk about making that happen instead of spinning a bunch of progressive pipe dreams.
For as little as it’s worth this early, according to the RCP average, the only person polling higher than Bernie is someone who hasn’t declared, is just as old, and is infamously gaffe prone. (And the person in third place is 8 points behind Sanders.)
With those numbers, you can’t just say “Bernie won’t win the nomination.” You’re going to have to show your work.
Can I show you my driver’s license? Because it would prove I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’m old enough to know that I have a better chance at the nomination than Bernie does.
Two (too) old white guys with excellent name recognition polling well almost two years out. Color me shocked.
Can’t you pass legislation through budget reconciliation?
I know you just get one – or sometimes two – per year, but if you pass two big packages that delivers solid material benefits, wouldn’t that be significant?
Or is it that the legislation needed – say Medicare for all and a Green New Deal – can’t be passed through budget reconciliation?
All assuming that a Democratic president in 2020 has at least simple majorities in both chambers.
Budget reconciliation has a bunch of limiting factors. We used it to pass half of ObamaCare after we lost our 60 vote majority in the Senate. The Republicans used it to pass their tax cuts, but those cuts have to sunset as a result, just as Bush’s tax cuts had to sunset.
The simplistic version is that anything in a budget reconciliation bill has to have some impact on revenues and it also has be at least budget neutral in the out years, so you can have a tax or tax cut within those limitations, but you’ll run into problems with matters that are more regulatory.
If you want a program that is going to cost a lot of money and it isn’t fully paid for, that law is going to have to expire so that it doesn’t add to the deficit in the out years.
It’s hard to tackle climate that way, or to build infrastructure, or to make big investments that don’t come with big tax increases, or to make long-term investments that people can faith in.
Some legislation can sneak through that way, but it is often crafted awkwardly just to satisfy the parliamentarian.
For example, you’d have to try regulating guns by taxing the shit out of them or something, or by making people pay fees for their background checks. I don’t know. You can get creative with it, but there are real limits.