Ezra Klein

I talk food politics, food and how to lay out your Thanksgiving meal with New York Times food writer and cookbook-author extraordinaire Mark Bittman.

Writing the last post got me thinking a bit about Bill Frist's admirable willingness to trash the traditions of the Senate and pursue the interests of his party. Arlen Specter straying? Strip him of his committee chairmanship. Democrats filibustering too many judicial nominees? Threaten to end the judicial filibuster.

That's hardball. It's not surprising given the importance of these issues, but it is surprising given the rarity with which the game is played like that. But maybe the answer lies in Frist's relatively short tenure: He was barely into his second term when he became Senate majority leader. By contrast, Reid became minority leader in 2005, but has served in Congress since 1982. Similarly, Tom Daschle went to Washington in 1979, and Trent Lott arrived in 1973. These guys had a lot more time to become interested and invested in the workings of the body. Frist had fairly little time to build up an identity as a member of this hallowed institution called Congress, and seemed more interested in gearing up for a presidential run, anyway.

Photo credit: Image used under a CC license from the Wikimedia Commons.

Harry Reid gives Jay Rockefeller a hug.

In comments, Eerac writes:

There's a simple way the entire party can avoid being held hostage by a few centrists. Adopt Republican-style committee management and threaten to strip filibustering democrats of their chairmanships. Lieberman and Lincoln are both heading committees that mean a hell of a lot more to them than blocking health care reform. I mean, Lincoln couldn't even be bothered to update the healthcare page on her website.

I get that many Senators are reluctant to curb their own authority, but surely many senators, young and old, are starting to realize that they are continually going to be held hostage by a group of 5 or 6 centrists. How do supporters of climate change legislation expect to pass a meaningful bill if they can't stop centrists from filibustering?

The Democrats have a real opportunity here to use healthcare as an excuse to enact some meaningful procedural reform. If that reform then goes on to help climate change and/or financial reform legislation go through, the party will be in a lot better shape then if everything ends up floundering.

There's plenty of precedent for this: In 2004, Arlen Specter warned President Bush that a Supreme Court nominee who didn't consider Roe to be settled law would probably face a filibuster. In response, conservatives threatened to rip his chairmanship away. And I don't mean "conservatives" as in Rush Limbaugh. I mean conservatives as in leaks from then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office. Specter quieted down real fast after that, and he helped bring the anti-choice Roberts and Alito in for a smooth landing. (Later on, of course, Specter defected from the Republican Party rather than lose to a Republican primary challenger, but that's an argument against certain types of primary challenges, not threatening committee chairmanships to induce more party loyalty.)

I'm generally of the opinion that the president and the Senate leadership can do a lot less to wrangle restive moderates than people think. But playing hardball on committee assignments is certainly within their power. Harry Reid, however, is not favorably inclined toward practicing this kind of active Senate management, though I've never gotten a really good answer as to why he's so against it, or more to the point, so against threatening it.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana.

Neil Sinhababu asks a good question:

Houston mayor Bill White [might] enter the race for Governor of Texas. This weakens [the Democrats'] position in the Senate race, as that's what White was running for before. On the Republican side, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson is leaving the Senate seat to challenge Gov. Rick Perry in the primary. I don't know why all the top-tier people are trying to become governor -- among the 50 states, the Texas Governor is one of the weaker state executives.

It's a good question. But I always thought the peculiarities of the Texas governorship explained quite a bit about the inner workings of the Bush administration. In Texas, the governor is a figurehead and real power lies, somewhat strangely, with the lieutenant governor, who controls both the budgetary process and the state Senate. Bush, for example, relied heavily on Bob Bullock, the legendary lieutenant governor, to guide his administration. That's largely why he had a reputation as a moderate: Bullock was a Democrat.

The vice president, conversely, is not traditionally a very powerful position (quite the opposite, actually), but when Bush got to Washington, he picked another grizzled, veteran figure who could play the Bullock role. He approached the presidency as if it was the Texas governorship, which made sense, given that that was the only elected office Bush had ever held, and thus the only system he was really comfortable with. Dick Cheney, of course, wasn't a Democrat, and he came a bit unhinged in the aftermath of 9/11, and thus the Bush administration was what it was. But for a president who will be remembered for massively expanding the power of the executive, Bush had a curiously passive understanding of the role of the president.

Photo credit: Associated Press

Tom Toles:

It has, however, been amusing to watch some conservatives argue that America is crying out for a much longer committee process and a much slower floor debate schedule on health care. If Americans were really so interested in watching deliberations over the bill, than the cable news networks would carry them, rather than leaving it for C-SPAN 2 (or was it C-SPAN 3 last weekend?). Indeed, on the night the House passed its bill -- a historic, drama-filled evening -- I was sitting in the MSNBC studio at 11 p.m., waiting for them to break from a repeat showing of the exciting prison documentary "Lockup!"

Tim Fernholz gives voice to some slightly heretical thoughts about pulling Ben Bernanke's renomination as chairman of the Federal Reserve and replacing him with a more full-employment oriented leader, like Federal Reserve governor Janet Yellen. But no, you gasp! That would be influencing the Fed!

Well, yes:

Right now, unemployment is a much larger problem than inflation, and creating a specific inflation target would, as Paul Krugman puts it in his discussion of the Japanese case in the 1990s, allow "the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible -- to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs." Negative real interest rates would be the step beyond the zero-interest rate policy that the Fed is following right now, which is not enough to provide a significant monetary expansion to allow for employment growth.

Bernanke could, conceivably, do something along these lines. But he hasn't yet. On the other hand, if you wanted someone who could credibly promise to be "irresponsible," at least from the view of monetary policy hawks, why not pick someone who Bond Vigilante-types already think is irresponsible (read, cares about unemployment), like San Francisco Federal Reserve President Janet Yellen? Some might claim that this would damage the Fed's "political independence," but actually making use of the main check that the government has over the Fed -- appointing the chairman -- should be seen as within the normal bounds of Fed-government relations.

There are reasons to avoid doing this, of course. As Fernholz admits, the financial markets would freak out, and Obama doesn't want that. And I don't have much of an opinion over whether Bernanke should continue serving or be replaced. But Fernholz's structural point is important: The Federal Reserve is insulated from politics, but it is not, in fact, independent, and nor is it supposed to be.

Presidents need not be afraid of appointing chairmen who represent a break from their predecessors or fall closer in line with the administration's priorities. Indeed, that's actually part of their job description. The Federal Reserve is designed to give the chairman distance after he or she is appointed, but the position is appointed precisely in order to give the more democratic branches control over who serves, and influence over what the institution's priorities are. We may live in the Republic of the Central Banker, but even he serves at the pleasure of the presidency.

Photo credit: Brendan Smialowski -- Bloomberg News.

"Are progressives really willing to take their chances with a future GOP-controlled Senate empowered to pass whatever they have 51 votes for?" asks Scott Winship. "With the Supreme Court nominees who could be seated (to say nothing of other judgeships)? With the restrictions on abortion and LGBQT rights? With welfare reforms?"

Let me say this once, and slowly: Yeeeeeeesssssssss.

A system governed by the filibuster is a system in which you can't really do anything, but you can't undo anything, either. If the Democrats pass health-care reform, but an angry populace throws 12 Democratic senators and 35 Democratic congresspeople out of office, and then impeaches Barack Obama and replaces him with Haley Barbour, nothing will happen to health-care reform. At least, not if the remaining Democrats don't want anything to happen to health-care reform. That is, on some level, insane: A landslide election is not likely to result in anything close to a ratification of the public's will.

Of course, some prefer this, particularly when they imagine themselves inhabiting the minority. This is the general defense of the filibuster: It's annoying for Democrats now, but it was a godsend for them when George W. Bush attempted to privatize Social Security. But it wasn't. Social Security reform collapsed beneath its own weight. It never came up for a vote in committee, much less in Congress. The filibuster wasn't necessary and wasn't used. There's a lesson in that: Parliamentary obstructionism is not all that stands between the public and ruin. Bad bills frequently prove unpopular, and that is usually enough. Congress, after all, is not an institution notable for its bravery.

But if Social Security reform had been popular, and 41 Democrats had managed to block it by threatening a talk-a-thon, that would have been a bad outcome, too. Small-d democrats should prefer a system in which the majority can enact its agenda and then must defend it before the voters to a system in which the majority cannot enact its agenda and must explain the complicated mechanisms behind its fecklessness to the voters.

In a system without the filibuster, the threat of repeal, as opposed to the impossibility of action, becomes the dominant player in legislative design, and it's much to be preferred. The clear accountability of passing laws and being judged on their success is far superior to the confusing campaigns that result from promising the passage of laws and then failing to surmount a filibuster. Strengthening that crucial relationship between cause (one party got elected) and effect (they passed bills) is not only better from the perspective of assuring action on problems. It's also a road to a better-informed citizenry that knows who to blame, and who to reward, for the condition of the country and the performance of the most recent Congress.

1) Corby Kummer's guide to turkey.

2) How Prop. 187 contributed to California's fiscal crisis.

3) Dennis Moore, a conservative Democrat from Kansas, is retiring next year. Will he start a trend?

4) Obama will set a target for America's carbon emissions.

Recipe of the day: Lots of good T-day ideas here.

James Galbraith points fingers:

Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate. There could have been prompt corrective action to resolve, instead of coddle, the worst of the banks.

I mostly don't blame President Obama; he and his team went as far as they felt they could. I blame the head-in-the-sand politicians in Congress, the over-optimistic forecasters, the half-educated press, and the power of the financial lobby. I blame the avatars of fiscal virtue, the public debt scare-mongerers, the astrologers for whom thirteen significant digits (a trillion) for the stimulus package was just too much. I blame the Senate, which hands the balance of power to small states at the expense of disaster areas like California, Florida and New York. I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that "credit would flow again" if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn't.

A couple of weeks back, Matthew Yglesias had an insightful post noting that "by far the fastest way to end the war in Afghanistan would be to ask General McChrystal’s staff to produce a plan to make it deficit neutral and find sixty votes in the Senate for his financing plan." Today, it looks like that question might be a bit more relevant, as Rep. David Obey is advocating a wartime surtax on high-income households to pay for any escalation in Afghanistan. "It’ll be interesting to see how far he goes with this," writes Yglesias. "Does he put together a bloc of progressive legislators who say they’ll only back a tax-financed version of the war? Would any Blue Dog budget balancers join such a group?"

A couple of points here. First, there's no reason this should be limited to high-income households. I can see the argument for concentrating a health-care tax at the top of the income pile, as the rich are getting massively subsidized by the system right now (through the employer tax exclusion), even though that's not my favored way to pay for the bill. But that doesn't hold for war, and if part of Obey's point is that we need to face these tradeoffs squarely, then he should design a tax that does exactly that, rather than continuing the fiction that we can pay for everything in American life by adding a bit more to the tax burden of the rich. Maybe a very small value-added tax?

Even so, it's nice to see Obey being radical enough to admit that war requires actual money. We have a discourse in America that's comfortable asking whether wars are winnable, but not whether they're worth it. In that way, we actually treat war rather like we treat health-care spending: the question is whether we can save a life or vanquish a foe, not whether this is the best use of money given all the other things that can be done with that money. That's one of the reasons, incidentally, that I'd like to see a simpler tax code, more along the lines of a VAT. A 1 percent rise in the tax rate would have a lot of meaning for people, and help us think clearly about what is, and isn't, worth doing.

[I]magine there's a big meeting with every member of the Democratic caucus in both chambers. You stand at the front of the room and make a presentation: "If health care reform falls apart after having come this far, tens of millions of Americans will suffer; costs will continue to soar; the public will perceive Democrats as too weak and incompetent to act on their own agenda; the party will lose a lot of seats in the midterms and possibly forfeit its majority; and President Obama will have suffered a devastating defeat that will severely limit his presidency going forward. No one will even try to fix the dysfunctional system again for decades, and the existing problems will only get worse."

For progressive Democrats, the response would be, "That's an unacceptable outcome, which we have to avoid."

For conservative Democrats, the response would be, "We can live with failure."

This necessarily affects negotiations. One contingent wants to avoid failure; the other contingent considers failure a satisfactory outcome. Both sides know what the other side is thinking.

That's Steve Benen, describing the dynamic in the Senate. As I've said before, I think a lot of folks imagine this as a negotiation, in which both sides want to get to yes, and so everyone is involved in a complex game to signal their comfort with failure in order to strengthen their ultimate bargaining position. But that's not an accurate depiction of the process.

If this is comparable to any form of negotiation, it's a hostage negotiation. The hostage-takers might not prefer to kill the kid, but there's definitely some upside to killing the kid, as it strengthens them in future negotiations. Conversely, the people on the other side of the phone don't want the kid to die, but also don't want a situation in which hostage-taking is encouraged. Generally, you try and resolve that by killing or capturing the hostage-takers, but that's not really an option here, with the closest analogue being a kamikaze primary challenge against Blanche Lincoln, which would come too late to affect health-care reform anyway.

That used to be one of the slogans for health-care reform: Every American should have the same insurance choices that members of Congress have. This obscured, to some degree, that members of Congress don't have very interesting choices: Most of them are covered by BlueCross BlueShield. But it sounded good.

In practice, however, it was hard to achieve, as the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program wasn't set up to insure all Americans. But as Joe Klein points out, Harry Reid is doing the slogan one better: Every member of Congress will now have the same choices ordinary Americans have:

My favorite provision requires that all members of Congress give up their federally-funded health care benefits and join the health care exchanges that will be set up by this bill. This is brilliant politics, addressing the tide of populist anger and fears of incipient socialism. But it also makes an important substantive point. The future of health care reform in this country will depend on how effectively the exchanges -- health insurance super-stores -- are working. If members of Congress have to participate in this system, you can bet they'll insist on an array of choices, similar to the system they currently use, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.

The one caveat to this is that every American doesn't have these choices. Only those few Americans eligible for the exchanges have these choices. So there's more work to be done. But this is good politics and, not incidentally, good policy. Given that the exchanges will largely serve limited to low-income Americans during the first 10 years, this at least assures them one powerful constituency.

Here's Joe Lieberman's latest argument against the public option:

"This is a radical departure from the way we've responded to the market in America in the past," Lieberman said Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press." "We rely first on competition in our market economy. When the competition fails, then what do we do? We regulate or we litigate. ... We have never before said, in a given business, we don't trust the companies in it, so we're going to have the government go into that business."

What does he think Social Security is? Or Medicare? Or public fire departments?

I'm starting to think that Lieberman knows perfectly well that his ever-shifting rationales don't make sense, and that he's inventing them to taunt liberals, not to explain his position. It's one thing to oppose the public option, after all. It's another to continually dangle misinformed rationales, implying that if liberals could just explain their argument clearly and logically enough, he'll change his mind. It's a deviously brilliant exploitation of liberal psychology. So devious, in fact, that it could only have come from a former liberal.

As I'm out in the Golden State for a couple of days, I'd like to spend some time reading about how truly and epically screwed California is. In particular, I'm looking for really good journalism -- magazine articles, deep blog posts, newspaper columns, whatever -- on the political and financial crises imperiling the state. Any suggestions?

Alton Brown explains why you should brine a turkey, and offers a logical proof of why stuffing is evil.

In past years, I've waited till Thanksgiving, or the day before, to ask you all what you're making. That, I realize, is stupid. It makes it much harder for me to steal your delicious recipes and ideas. So what's gracing your Thanksgiving table this year?

Jon Cohn surveys the final months of the health-care reform process:

For progressives, victories are more likely to come in the form of ground not conceded than ground gained. Every day that legislation doesn’t get worse is a day to cherish.

I once heard an activist say that leadership is the process of managing your constituency's disappointment. If that's accurate, then the next few months are going to offer ample opportunities for leadership.

“If you get to the final point and you are a critical vote for health care reform and every piece of evidence tells you if you support the bill you will lose your job, would you cast the vote and lose your job?”

Every congressman should have to answer this question directly. In this case, however, David Gregory asked it of Sen. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat appointed to Ken Salazar's seat. Bennet answered very simply: "Yes."

Bennet, it should be said, is a vulnerable senator. He's a moderate Democrat in a swing state who was appointed to his seat with no electoral skills or existing political base. But maybe that accounts for his clarity on this question. Bennet was formerly chief of staff to the mayor of Denver and then superintendent of the city's school system. He has never made the compromises that lead to reelection, nor learned the complex set of rationalizations that lead so many politicians to justify those compromises. He can, presumably, imagine life after elected politics, in a way many career politicians can't. He's not learned how to say "no" to Gregory's question yet, or come to believe that he should. It's a refreshing attitude, and on some level, the only peculiar thing about it is that it's so rare.

Kevin Hassett's review of Bruce Bartlett's new book critiquing the relevance of supply-side economics is an extraordinary document. The review appears in the National Review, and Hassett is a well-known conservative economist. Somewhat predictably, his review starts out straining to attack Bartlett. After quickly recapping Bartlett's journey as a harsh conservative critic of George W. Bush, Hassett puts him swiftly in place. "There is perhaps no man so praiseworthy in 'elite' circles as the prodigal conservative who has 'seen the light,' " writes Hassett, leaning heavily on scare quotes. "Bartlett has been practically blinded by it, and has, accordingly, become a media darling." Oh, snap!

But Hassett's effort at a takedown crashes quickly on the shoals of Bartlett's actual argument, which Hassett finds himself unable to reject quite so flippantly:

The problem is that the supply-side formula requires lower taxes and smaller government. You cannot, Bartlett correctly argues, have one without the other. In the U.S., government spending has advanced steadily under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The difference between Republicans and Democrats appears to be that Republicans, who oppose higher taxes in almost every form, pursue policies that end up being unsustainable.

As bad as it is today, when one looks ahead to an America that shortly will have the same age distribution that Florida has now, one can only conclude that it is going to get much worse. The health bills of our senior citizens alone may well exceed the current size of government in a few decades. Bartlett starts a difficult conversation. If we cannot constrain the growth of government, are we going to try to run a Ponzi scheme, or are we going to pay for it? If we choose the latter, how are we going to raise the money? Bartlett's answers are well researched, drawing on a massive literature.

On this, Hassett and I agree. And I'll take the opportunity to say Democrats have been little better than Republicans. President Obama's most damaging campaign promise was his inane pledge to preserve tax rates on people making under $250,000 a year. His attacks on John McCain's effort to tax health-care benefits limited his options when he became president and realized that that was exactly what needed to be done, leaving Democrats proposing a roundabout excise tax on expensive insurance plans, which is, at base, a less progressive policy. (Taxing health benefits allows the tax to vary with the worker's income, while the excise tax is a flat rate.)

Put it all together and America is in a much harder situation than it was in the early-90s, when George H.W. Bush raised taxes to help cut the deficit, and Bill Clinton quickly followed his lead. The tax conversation wasn't free of demagoguery then, but assorted grown-ups were at least willing to ignore it. Not so now.

This is a good point from Fred Hiatt:

[M]aybe the country isn't all that divided -- most of us would welcome common-sense improvements in health-care delivery and insurance -- but the system feeds on and exacerbates our differences. The advent of the 60-vote rule in the Senate has magnified the already formidable checks and balances built into the Constitution, with the disproportionate blocking power it awards small and rural states. Cable television and the Internet have empowered those with the greatest intensity of feeling. The self-serving redistricting habits of the political elite, designed to protect incumbents, have left most legislators vulnerable only to primary challenges from the extremes of their respective parties.

Whichever explanation appeals to you -- and no doubt they all contain some truth -- the perception of paralysis increases the urgency of passing health-care reform. Failure would damage the Obama presidency, and it would also deepen the fear, here and abroad, that America is stuck.

To put this slightly differently, the failure of this health-care reform bill will not be taken as evidence that people should try other health-care reform bills with much more severe -- and thus unpopular -- cost-cutting measures. It will be that even a popular president backed by the largest Senate majority since the 1970s couldn't pass a fairly modest health-care bill. If you don't believe me, just ask the Republican presidential candidates if any of them are preparing detailed plans to privatize Social Security.

"Doing" health-care reform proves something important: Health-care reform can be done. That's not an argument for a bad bill, as Hiatt is careful to say, but it's an argument for recognizing that an imperfect bill is the beginning of a necessary process, while a damaging defeat ends any hope of one.

James Fallows publishes some good takes on President Obama's trip to China, which, unlike most of the domestic commentary on the trip, were contributed by people living in China.