I don't know how to feel about the CR with no Ukraine aid. It remains to be seen whether the Ukraine funding actually happens, and the Dems essentially got the CR they wanted aside from that.\
The Tuberville thing is very different. In effect, the Democrats have chosen to let him win, and that is terrible.
I agree with the basic argument you put forth, but I also think that Ukraine aid has more than sufficient support in both chambers to be easily enacted (it earlier passed 3-1 in the House). Also assume that all the parties involved in arranging the vote on Saturday understand this. Separating the Ukraine aid question out to avert a disastrous shutdown for federal workers and many Americans dependent on federal social assistance programs while killing off all the BS demands about the border or necessary social programs seems like a good way to have gotten the CR passed. Still, once again, I agree with your core argument. Democrats have put up with too many "paper cuts" while failing to realize how cumulatively it has led to a certain anemia with regard to how to properly respond to persistent Republican attacks on what should be established.
The entire question about Senate rules per se is in a different orbit. Most of those cited such as the filibuster or the "hold" or the 60 vote cloture standard are totally archaic and should be abandoned. Every Democratic Senate race next year should include a pledge to do so.
You may very well be right. I hope you are, and if I were a betting person, I’d probably wager on it. But at the end of the day it does require either trusting Kevin McCarthy, or trusting several vulnerable House Republicans to cross the rest of their party, including Donald Trump. There’s just more failure risk here than I think official Washington appreciates.
I hope I am right also. The House already approved Ukraine aide with an enormous number of Republican votes and I trust somehow that those votes will be reaffirmed. (Maybe it will be forwarded by McCarthy as part of a deal to not support any measure to vacate. He is now something of a hostage to Democratic goodwill, how ironic.!) But your skepticism is totally reasonable and, deep in my heart, I share it.
“are Democrats really driving Republicans to surrender, or are they staving them off with concessions small enough to avoid blowback or crisis?”
Preach!
I have nothing intelligent to add to the discussion other than you said everything I‘ve been feeling about the filibuster and the death by a thousand paper cuts we’re experiencing by giving “little” things here and there to MAGA.
I worry that Tuberville's hold on military personnel actions, unless remedied, will aid a future Trump administration in staffing the military with loyalists. It occurs to me that this could be either intentional or unintentional on his part.
Brian, have you written about loss aversion as a motivator?
I think the two parties have always different in how heavily they have weighed loss aversion , and all the moreso in the Trump era.
When the Democrats come into conflict with the GOP, I think they consider the downside consequences of going head to head and losing, and this leads them to look for a way out (minimize the risk of a catastrophic loss) even when it looks as if they have the better hand. For example, Democrats might think "if we get rid of the filibuster, Republicans will ban abortion the next time they come into power" or something like that. The Republicans, I think always, but especially in the Trump era, put a much lower weight on loss aversion. This allows them to pick up a lot of wins where it looks like they should lose, but in theory it opens them up to major losses as well.
I'm thinkiing about this in the context of the Matt Gaetz motion to vacate. I think if the shoe was on the other foot, and fringe Democrats had rebelled against Speaker Pelosi, the GOP would almost certainly have helped boot her out. But I think the Democrats are likely to size up the situation and decide that tossing the House majority into chaos at a time when the House needs to pass Ukraine aid, appropriations bills, and potentially another CR has too much potatnail for disaster. So I think they are more likely to vote "present" and allow McCarthy to remain Speaker than they are to join Gaetz in ousting him.
I so often see this rub between liberals who are tired of the broken parts of our democracy and demand our representatives shift all focus to fix it post haste and liberals who are trying to support Dems blindly to counterbalance MAGA Republicans. I maintain there's a proper middle ground that ought to be the ideal here.
Your writing suggests there's room to critique and expect more from our Dem representatives even in the current political environment, but while I agree with your strategy on paper, I wonder how easy it would be to communicate and govern that way. For example, you say here:
"Earlier this year, when President Biden reneged on his promise never to negotiate a debt-limit deal with Republicans under threat of default, Democrats spun a tale of victory out of how little they'd ultimately conceded. They boasted that Biden had even managed to pre-empt a fall government-shutdown fight, and large cuts to discretionary spending, because the debt-limit deal set binding budget caps for House and Senate appropriators."
If Biden didn't negotiate with McCarthy at that point in time, he risked global market failure - I want a president who blinks when McCarthy holds a gun to the head of the American economy but maybe that's just me.
At any rate, the promise to never negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling was transparently a negotiating tactic and secondly another example of Kabuki theater which is a mandatory component of American politics even for the left.
I strongly agree with the brinksmanship concerns, but the best way to defeat the filibuster is to win elections which means getting Dems elected. Isn't that your priority? What do you think would drive change?
I wanted to squeeze in a section that addresses precisely this question, but the piece started becoming too unwieldy, so I decided to save it for a near-future newsletter. The nickel version is something like: actually not blinking is important, even when the stakes are high, but the less risky approach would be to contest elections on these specific grounds, rather than on whatever grounds (crime, inflation) panicky party strategists and consultants recommend. Win those elections and a) you drive some extremists out of office and b) MAYBE Republicans actually learn that hostage taking and lying and corruption are liabilities for them, and dial them back some.
I don't know if they're panicky strategist or just strategist who are very precious with taking risks with the American experiment. However, I'm interested in hearing this side of politics as well.
My big concern with this messaging is that by pitching a message that's further and further from the zeitgeist, you're not pulling the country left, you're pushing the center to the right. But perhaps there's more salient messaging possible than what the Majority Report type dems are pushing now, I don't know.
Couple of thoughts. I am sympathetic to the idea that Dems should start taking some worthwhile hostages every once in a while. Like slipping a $15 minimum wage into a piece of so-called “must pass” legislation. I know they won’t, but for a party so thoroughly obsessed with means, they spend frighteningly little time talking about ends.
Not to be so bold, but I think it's an awful idea to encourage hostage-taking as a form of negotiation. For one, government shutdowns almost always backfire on the party that causes the shutdown. Two, that's no way for a democracy to function, and if you're arguing for hostage-taking because you can't get your preferred policy preferences, then you either need to do better work to electing more members to support that idea -- or convincing the public that your position is the correct one -- or you're just treating a symptom and not the disease of the problem: that is, poor democratic institutional design.
It’s not a video about shutdowns and hostage taking. It is about how Democrats’ persistent faith in “the process” and valuing procedural means at the expense of ideological ends is not a recipe for long-term success. It centers on the Garland debacle but I think it is broadly applicable to a variety of situations, and entirely consistent with messages pushed by people like Brian who want Democrats to do more with the power they have.
I don't know how to feel about the CR with no Ukraine aid. It remains to be seen whether the Ukraine funding actually happens, and the Dems essentially got the CR they wanted aside from that.\
The Tuberville thing is very different. In effect, the Democrats have chosen to let him win, and that is terrible.
I agree with the basic argument you put forth, but I also think that Ukraine aid has more than sufficient support in both chambers to be easily enacted (it earlier passed 3-1 in the House). Also assume that all the parties involved in arranging the vote on Saturday understand this. Separating the Ukraine aid question out to avert a disastrous shutdown for federal workers and many Americans dependent on federal social assistance programs while killing off all the BS demands about the border or necessary social programs seems like a good way to have gotten the CR passed. Still, once again, I agree with your core argument. Democrats have put up with too many "paper cuts" while failing to realize how cumulatively it has led to a certain anemia with regard to how to properly respond to persistent Republican attacks on what should be established.
The entire question about Senate rules per se is in a different orbit. Most of those cited such as the filibuster or the "hold" or the 60 vote cloture standard are totally archaic and should be abandoned. Every Democratic Senate race next year should include a pledge to do so.
You may very well be right. I hope you are, and if I were a betting person, I’d probably wager on it. But at the end of the day it does require either trusting Kevin McCarthy, or trusting several vulnerable House Republicans to cross the rest of their party, including Donald Trump. There’s just more failure risk here than I think official Washington appreciates.
I hope I am right also. The House already approved Ukraine aide with an enormous number of Republican votes and I trust somehow that those votes will be reaffirmed. (Maybe it will be forwarded by McCarthy as part of a deal to not support any measure to vacate. He is now something of a hostage to Democratic goodwill, how ironic.!) But your skepticism is totally reasonable and, deep in my heart, I share it.
Not to prophecy doom, but I had missed this. He's left himself a little bit of wiggle room but McCarthy's now at least gesturing at the idea that he won't allow any more Ukraine aid to pass unless Dems accede to GOP border policy. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-mccarthy-ukraine-border-security-lindsey-graham/
Well, at 3:30 today, its beginning to look like McCarthy won’t be linking Ukraine approval to anything whatsoever.
What comes next is a complete puzzle.
“are Democrats really driving Republicans to surrender, or are they staving them off with concessions small enough to avoid blowback or crisis?”
Preach!
I have nothing intelligent to add to the discussion other than you said everything I‘ve been feeling about the filibuster and the death by a thousand paper cuts we’re experiencing by giving “little” things here and there to MAGA.
I worry that Tuberville's hold on military personnel actions, unless remedied, will aid a future Trump administration in staffing the military with loyalists. It occurs to me that this could be either intentional or unintentional on his part.
It’s amazing - and galling to me - that you had to leave your prior place of employ in order to say what you say here.
Thanks for doing it.
Brian, have you written about loss aversion as a motivator?
I think the two parties have always different in how heavily they have weighed loss aversion , and all the moreso in the Trump era.
When the Democrats come into conflict with the GOP, I think they consider the downside consequences of going head to head and losing, and this leads them to look for a way out (minimize the risk of a catastrophic loss) even when it looks as if they have the better hand. For example, Democrats might think "if we get rid of the filibuster, Republicans will ban abortion the next time they come into power" or something like that. The Republicans, I think always, but especially in the Trump era, put a much lower weight on loss aversion. This allows them to pick up a lot of wins where it looks like they should lose, but in theory it opens them up to major losses as well.
I'm thinkiing about this in the context of the Matt Gaetz motion to vacate. I think if the shoe was on the other foot, and fringe Democrats had rebelled against Speaker Pelosi, the GOP would almost certainly have helped boot her out. But I think the Democrats are likely to size up the situation and decide that tossing the House majority into chaos at a time when the House needs to pass Ukraine aid, appropriations bills, and potentially another CR has too much potatnail for disaster. So I think they are more likely to vote "present" and allow McCarthy to remain Speaker than they are to join Gaetz in ousting him.
I so often see this rub between liberals who are tired of the broken parts of our democracy and demand our representatives shift all focus to fix it post haste and liberals who are trying to support Dems blindly to counterbalance MAGA Republicans. I maintain there's a proper middle ground that ought to be the ideal here.
Your writing suggests there's room to critique and expect more from our Dem representatives even in the current political environment, but while I agree with your strategy on paper, I wonder how easy it would be to communicate and govern that way. For example, you say here:
"Earlier this year, when President Biden reneged on his promise never to negotiate a debt-limit deal with Republicans under threat of default, Democrats spun a tale of victory out of how little they'd ultimately conceded. They boasted that Biden had even managed to pre-empt a fall government-shutdown fight, and large cuts to discretionary spending, because the debt-limit deal set binding budget caps for House and Senate appropriators."
If Biden didn't negotiate with McCarthy at that point in time, he risked global market failure - I want a president who blinks when McCarthy holds a gun to the head of the American economy but maybe that's just me.
At any rate, the promise to never negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling was transparently a negotiating tactic and secondly another example of Kabuki theater which is a mandatory component of American politics even for the left.
I strongly agree with the brinksmanship concerns, but the best way to defeat the filibuster is to win elections which means getting Dems elected. Isn't that your priority? What do you think would drive change?
I wanted to squeeze in a section that addresses precisely this question, but the piece started becoming too unwieldy, so I decided to save it for a near-future newsletter. The nickel version is something like: actually not blinking is important, even when the stakes are high, but the less risky approach would be to contest elections on these specific grounds, rather than on whatever grounds (crime, inflation) panicky party strategists and consultants recommend. Win those elections and a) you drive some extremists out of office and b) MAYBE Republicans actually learn that hostage taking and lying and corruption are liabilities for them, and dial them back some.
I don't know if they're panicky strategist or just strategist who are very precious with taking risks with the American experiment. However, I'm interested in hearing this side of politics as well.
My big concern with this messaging is that by pitching a message that's further and further from the zeitgeist, you're not pulling the country left, you're pushing the center to the right. But perhaps there's more salient messaging possible than what the Majority Report type dems are pushing now, I don't know.
Couple of thoughts. I am sympathetic to the idea that Dems should start taking some worthwhile hostages every once in a while. Like slipping a $15 minimum wage into a piece of so-called “must pass” legislation. I know they won’t, but for a party so thoroughly obsessed with means, they spend frighteningly little time talking about ends.
There’s a great video by the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios called “You Go High, We Go Low” that explores this dynamic: https://youtu.be/MAbab8aP4_A?si=IK82RIcXA0klEXXD
Not to be so bold, but I think it's an awful idea to encourage hostage-taking as a form of negotiation. For one, government shutdowns almost always backfire on the party that causes the shutdown. Two, that's no way for a democracy to function, and if you're arguing for hostage-taking because you can't get your preferred policy preferences, then you either need to do better work to electing more members to support that idea -- or convincing the public that your position is the correct one -- or you're just treating a symptom and not the disease of the problem: that is, poor democratic institutional design.
Did you watch the video? You can argue about ends until the cows come home, it doesn’t ultimately matter.
No, I didn't watch the video. And I'm not discussing the ends, but the means.
I meant to say “means”. And I would watch the video.
Unless you can explain to me how gambling with people's paychecks is a good thing, I think I'm going to decline that chance.
It’s not a video about shutdowns and hostage taking. It is about how Democrats’ persistent faith in “the process” and valuing procedural means at the expense of ideological ends is not a recipe for long-term success. It centers on the Garland debacle but I think it is broadly applicable to a variety of situations, and entirely consistent with messages pushed by people like Brian who want Democrats to do more with the power they have.
Innuendo Studios is BRILLIANT