The Power and the Money

Puerto Rico is not following the Tennessee Plan, but it may work regardless

In 1790, North Carolina ceded its western territories to the federal government in payment for the federal assumption of its revolutionary debts. In March 1796, the Southwest Territory unilaterally declared that it was now a state. The legislature elected two senators and organized a popular vote for two representatives. The delegation showed up in Washington and demanded to be seated. After a few months of confusion, Congress passed a joint resolution admitting the Southwest Territory as the State of Tennessee. Congress seated the two senators, who had been constitutionally selected by the legislature, but insisted on a new election for the House of Representatives. 

That was before the 17th Amendment, however. But in 1959, the Alaska Territory tried the same thing. The state organized elections for two senators and a representative, who went to Washington and asked to take their seats. Congress agreed to seat the representatives in 1959, as part of a deal that also admitted (then Republican) Hawaii. 

But such a plan is not a sure shot at success. Did you know that  the District of Columbia has been electing shadow senators since 1990? I discovered this fact on March 13, 2016.

I was stuck at a red light on an exit ramp from Rock Creek Parkway onto Massachusetts Avenue, when I saw that the Chrysler 300M ahead of me had the strangest license plates. They were D.C. plates, but instead of a number there were the words “US SENATOR” in an unusually small font. 

So I took a photo.

To my surprise, the Chrysler dropped behind me and started to tail my car. This went on for about two miles. Annoyed, I pulled onto a side street, stopped the car, and walked over to car now tailing me. I knocked on his window. “You’re following me.” It wasn’t a question. 

The driver, a bearded white man, responded with no hostility in his voice. (That will be hard to believe when you read the words, but it is true.) “You took a picture. Was there something you didn’t like about the car?” 

My voice likely showed some irritation. “I’ve never seen a license plate like that. I took a picture. Are you a Senator I don’t recognize?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, “I’m sorry, there’ve been incidents.”

“What incidents?” I responded. “What senator do you work for?” But he drove off. 

And that was how I discovered that he was Paul Strauss, one of D.C.’s shadow senators, elected by the people of the District to lobby Congress for statehood. So far, Strauss and his colleague, Mike Brown, have accomplished precisely nothing.

Puerto Rico is now trying what it claims to be the same strategy. Appoint shadow senators and representatives and lobby Congress to have them seated. But:

1. Problem #1 with the plan is that the would-be congresspeople haven’t been elected. So poof, none of the legitimacy that the representatives from Tennessee (and later Alaska) brought to the table. 
2. Problem #2 is that Puerto Rico will be highly Democratic. Despite impressions, that was not true as of September 20, 2016 2017. But now, after the Trump administration decided that it did not care about the island, whatever conservative leanings the electorate might have had have been destroyed. Republican strategists know this. But the Puerto Rican delegation has no plan (a la the paired admission of Alaska and Hawaii) to counterbalance.
3. And problem #3 is that D.C. has been trying the serious version of the strategy for 27 years, to no avail. 

Which means that I should be here saying that this strategy has a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding. But I actually think the reverse. In fact, I would bet on statehood happening very fast the next time that Democrats win both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Once upon a time admitting two states (D.C. and P.R.) on a party-line vote would have been seen as a sort of unconscionable gerrymandering. But that time is passing. The norms of American political life have been going out the window for some time, maybe since Robert Bork, certainly since Texas decided to carry out its intercensal redistricting in 2003. (The redistricting violated political norms, but despite all the liberal outrage, it actually made Texas politics fairer and more democratic. Really.)

I do not see the political penalty for the Democrats from shoving through statehood for both jurisdictions at the next chance they get. Plus side: four extra senators. Minus side: some loss of control over the District on the part of Democratic representatives from Maryland.

Which leaves only one reason not to admit either or both the District and Puerto Rico: fear of a voter backlash at the following election.

Is that likely? 

Schneiderman ain’t playing

We called it. Robert Mueller has announced that he is teaming up with Eric Schneiderman, the NYS attorney general. Right now the cooperation is about Manafort but we expect future announcements.

As we pointed out, President Trump can only pardon people for federal offenses. So if Mueller finds evidence of violations of New York laws, Schneiderman and he can threaten the perpetrators with state prosecution unless they cough up more evidence. 

A related question: can it really be true that Arpaio has broken no state laws? I know there have been multiple civil suits; did he comply with all of them?

Painting a scary picture for President Trump: civil asset forfeiture edition

In comments, NYCMT wrote the following: “You know what might survive a presidential pardon? A civil asset forfeiture claim.” I have now talked to him in depth about what this meant.

The federal government has a lot of power to seize property involved in the commission of a crime. 18 USC 981 (a)(1)(A) states “The following property is subject to forfeiture to the United States: any property, real or personal, involved in a transaction or attempted transaction in violation of section 1956, 1957 or 1960 of this title, or any property traceable to such property.” Sections 1956 and 1957 deal with money-laundering, tax fraud, and dealing in assets that are the result of crimes. 

The key is that civil forfeiture is undertaken against property, not an individual! You can pardon a person from a criminal act but you cannot pardon their property against a civil judgment. Moreover, forfeitures are undertaken under a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. Since a pardon would essentially admit as true all of the facts of the criminal charges involving the property, a civil asset forfeiture proceeding would be a slam dunk for a federal prosecutor.

NYMCT laid out the following hypothetical. On the last day of the Trump presidency‎, right before the Senate takes its vote on the articles of impeachment reported out of the House, Donald Trump signs several hundred pardons, not least for himself, but also for his associates in the Trump Organization, his counterparties in a number of different transactions, and the principles of all financial firms whom may have been involved in any of his financial transactions. The pardons cover not only any financial crimes but all violations of the various sedition, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice statutes.

Well, if the pardons specify all illegal conduct against the United States then they become open ended gateways to factual stipulations in later court proceedings. If one single transaction involves the Trump Organization, even as an intermediary, then you have trouble. I dunno, imagine a purchaser of first resort for a condominium in Trump Tower funded through a secured credit facility that relies on underlying assets like Trump Tower or Trump Village in Coney Island. If that credit facility was repaid with money traceable directly to the proceeds of crime, then it satisfies the materiality requirements under 18 USC 981(a)(1) and the feds can seize the securing assets.

This does not mean that President Trump is going to lose his stuff! I have no idea what crimes, if any, have been committed. What it does mean is that if Mueller uncovers financial chicanery, then President Trump cannot pardon himself out of trouble. (Assuming, that is, that the courts interpret the pardon power as allowing the president to pardon himself.) In addition to potential state prosecutions, he would run the risk of losing many of the things that really matter to him.

President Trump cannot pardon himself out of trouble

The Trump presidency is different, as I note when I am outside the United States. Back during the Bush administration, foreigners would often (and without prompting) verbally criticize traveling Americans for the actions and policies of our President. And when that happened to me, which was often, I often felt an emotional need to defend President Bush, no matter how terrible a president I actually thought he was.

With the Donald, though, not so much on either tip. Oh, he certainly comes up all the time, far more than President Bush ever did. But nobody — not in the Netherlands, not in Uruguay, not in Argentina, and not in Mexico — has ever put on an accusatory tone. It is more pity, sometimes shaded with incredulity. That may be why I have never felt any urge to defend the Trump administration ... but I suspect that even should I hear a vicious hostile angry attack on his presidency my reaction would be, “Well, yeah.”

The worst that has happened to anyone I know is the American daughter of a good friend, who got a nasty note in her Mexico City school calling her a “Trump lover.” (Both the friend and his daughter are also Mexican citizens, but kids don’t care about that.) Considering what has been happening in U.S. schools, that is small beans. And compared to the Bush administration, it is nothing.

It is something to have Mexicans pity you for living under a corrupt president. In Mexico, one of the biggest problems that officials seem to be immune from prosecution. They cannot be indicted while in office and it is damnably hard to prove anything once out.

Which brings me to the recent news that the Trump administration is considering issuing pardons for the president and his family. Such pardons would be unprecedented in American history, but it is not clear that they would be unconstitutional. I certainly think that it would have been ridiculous for the framers to have given the president the power to pardon themself, but the question is open.

Except it might not matter! Donald Trump is a resident of New York State and the owner-proprietor of 500 different partnerships, LLC’s, S-corps, and pass-through proprietorships forming the Trump Organization business collectivity domiciled in New York. Trump’s business activity occurs in New York State as a consequence of his residency and offices located in New York, and his financial transactions, insofar as the financial entities within which those transactions take place are under New York State supervision and regulation, are subject to New York State law.

Imagine that the Mueller investigation uncovers some sort of financial chicanery. Well, I talked to Dave Greenbaum, a lawyer from Trump’s home borough (not pictured above!), and as you might expect any such evidence would be admissible in New York courts and give Eric Schneiderman all the ammunition he needs to go after the President. (At least once he is out of office; beforehand is less clear.) 

The easy stuff: misstated income and fraudulent income tax returns. If Trump has been using his labyrinthine corporate structure to hide income, he is liable for New York income tax fraud under Tax Laws 1805 and 1806, which would be felonies. Even if he pardoned himself for the federal income tax evasion, he would still be liable for state tax evasion.

Getting harder: securities and business entity fraud under GBL 23-A-352 and 353, aka the Martin Act. If Trump has been using his business entities to shuttle debt and conceal liabilities from lenders, limited partners, and other persons, he is potentially liable for felony misrepresentation under identical elements as SEC rule 10b-5. (Misrepresentation or Omission, and Materiality). A federal SEC violation would be chargeable under New York law, as long as New York had jurisdiction, and since Trump is a New York citizen and most of his business happens in New York, despite choice of law clauses, New York would have jurisdiction.

Harder still: New York no longer has a treason statute, but any foreign payments structured so as to defraud co-owners or partners or secured parties would serve for bank fraud or Martin Act charges. And New York has a conspiracy law just as strong as 18 USC 371. Plus, in New York you can be charged for attempting financial crimes, even if you fail to pull it off.

Barely possible: New York has two relevant laws on obstruction of justice: NYPL 195.05 and  NYPL 205.50 et seq. 195.05. “Obstructing govt. admin in the second degree” consists of affirmative action to prevent a public servant from carrying out their official duties and it is a Class A misdemeanor. 205.50 is “hindering prosecution,” which can range from a Class A misdemeanor to a Class E felony. That law could conceivably be used to prosecute the Bharara firing, given that Bharara was working with the New York attorney general to trawl Trump payments through New York banks, but it would be hard to argue that it really obstructed government administration or hindered prosecution in New York State.

Basically impossible: payoffs that take the form of capital investments in Trump businesses unless there is an obvious quid pro quo or you can use them to charge conspiracy to commit tax fraud. It is barely possible that if Trump uses a vehicle as a conduit for a payment that he only partially owns, he could be charged with a Class B misdemeanor for ripping off a co-owner.

In short, if the Mueller investigation uncovers untoward things in the President’s business dealings,it is highly likely that the State of New York will come after him. It will not be as effective as a federal prosecution, but even if he pardons himself and Congress fails to remove him, he will still be in no small legal peril.

¿Viva Nueva York?

Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest: explaining the $2 trillion Trump budget error to Uruguayans

Some of you may have heard of the ridiculous error in the Trump budget.

The error, in fact, is so ridiculous that you may have some trouble following the explanations. Matt Yglesias and Larry Summers, for example, managed to confuse me about something super simple. So how was I going to explain this to a bunch of incredulous Uruguayan economists? 

Finally, here is what I told them.

1. The Treasury Secretary published a bunch of tax cuts that would cost $4 trillion. But he then said: hey, no worries, the cuts will speed economic growth so their actual cost will be only $2 trillion.
2. The budget director took that estimate and said: we have tax cuts that cost $2 trillion, but hey, no worries, the cuts will speed economic growth so their actual cost be zero.

Uh ... yes, the error is that stupid. Thus, it was weirdly hard to explain.

This “news” is striking, even for Politico

Politico reports that President Trump “has come through on three big asks” for California. That was an interesting headline! So I read the story. And it turns out that the “three big asks” are disaster declarations. 

Think about that. It is newsworthy that President Trump didn’t set what’s left of his presidency on fire out of pure spite. And make no bones about it: denying disaster assistance to a state experiencing natural disasters would sink his presidency right quick. Not to mention the shot-in-the-arm it would give to that fundamentally ridiculous secession movement. 

Yet it was and remains plausible that he would do such a thing. What a goddamned time we live in.

Trump immigration raids are for white voters in the Midwest

The Trump administration may or may not be seriously considering mobilizing the National Guard to deport illegal immigrants. (The link goes to the draft memo, not a secondary source.) The reason why the administration would need state governors to agree is that a federal mobilization of the ARNG to enforce domestic law would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. (Again, the link is to the actual text.)

But the Trump administration has begun making spectacular immigration raids. Those raids, however, are not picking up very many people: only 680 in the first week, according to this report. And the deportees are all criminals, whom the Obama administration was already deporting in massive numbers. 

So what is the point? Two possibilities.

1. This is just the start of a massively stepped-up program, including those National Guard mobilizations and lots of new federal spending.
2. This is intended to give Trump voters a sense that something dramatic is being done. The terror that it strikes among immigrants is collateral damage. (Or maybe collateral benefit, from Steve Bannon’s point of view.) 

Considering that this administration appears to be the opposite of a well-oiled machine in terms of management ability, but does seem to be taking the permanent campaign to a new level, I would bet on the latter. Like the infamous taco bowl tweet from the campaign, this is aimed squarely at angry white voters. 

A flickering point of light in the Trump cabinet

There is not a lot to like in the Trump administration’s cabinet picks. But there is one who, jokes aside, might be a reasonably decent pick: Rick Perry.

I know, he wanted to abolish the agency he will run. And most of what Energy does involves nuclear weapons. But hear me out. Short version: Rick Perry has a surprisingly good energy record in Texas, and I speak as a deep green. If he embraces it and pushes it inside the Trump administration, then he will leave a great legacy. Sadly, that is not how I would bet, since the Governor has shied away from his biggest accomplishment.

Long version: Governor Perry has a surprisingly good record in Texas. The centerpiece of his accomplishments is a massive infrastructure plan called CREZ: the “Competitive Renewable Energy Zone.” In 2005, the legislature empowered the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) to create zones prioritzing the construction of long-distance power lines. The resulting infrastructure allowed the state to blow through all its targets for green energy. It hit its 2025 target in 2009. As of October 2016, wind had generated a bit over 12% of all utility-scale electric power in the state: not too far behind Germany at 17%. In fact, on November 27, windpower supplied 45% of total electricity demand. 

A Texan energy guy I speak to (wind or oil? You guess!) said that Perry was instrumental in finishing CREZ. Perry wasn’t the mastermind of the legislative push — with unanimity in the Senate and 91-14 in the House, and Troy Fraser pushing it in the Senate, that wasn’t the hard part. Rather, the SB 20 was a short act. (The link goes to the text; the legislative analysis is here and the whole legislative history is here.) It instructed PUCT to approve applications for CREZ power lines within 180 days, but that left a host of political and legal obstacles that would have killed the project in many other states. (I’m looking at you, Golden State.) 

What Perry did was, in the words of my acquaintance, “pull together folks from the various agencies, along with members of the House and Senate, and said, ‘All right, here’s a series of challenges that need to be addressed.’” In 2008, for example, it looked like the project was going to stall out, but Perry kept pushing. It got done, one of the most impressive infrastructure projects of the (pathetic) 21st-century United States. 

Could Secretary Perry take this national?

Yes! One of the great unheralded accomplishments of the second Bush administration (along with Medicare Part D) was the Energy Policy Act of 2005. First, it had a decent name rather than one of these stupid cutesy acronyms or idiot propaganda titles. Second, Section 216 empowered the Department of Energy (DOE) to “designate any geographic area experiencing electric energy transmission capacity constraints or congestion that adversely affects consumers as a national interest electric transmission corridor.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) could then authorize power lines, which would grant the operating utilities the right to exercise eminent domain. 

Now, none of this would be easy.

First, Perry would need to coordinate with Agriculture, Commerce and Interior.

Second, the courts have hamstrung the Act, holding that FERC cannot overturn a state refusal to permit a transmission line. (There is some pin-dancing, of course: that interpretation hinges on what Congress meant by the phrase  “withheld approval.” See page 96.) So Perry would need to get Justice on his side and make some persuasive legal arguments. Or he would need to get the President back a new Energy Policy Act clarifying federal authority. That would not be unprecedented: the Natural Gas Act of 1938 gives FERC the power to use eminent domain to build interstate pipelines. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 did the same for LNG terminals. 

Now, one might imagine that the current President-elect would be open to this sort of thing. Call them the Trumplines, hand out tax credits, use eminent domain with abandon, limit court appeals. Back to the 1930s! Green energy but with cronyism! What is not to like? 

Well ...

... third, Governor Perry hasn’t exactly owned his accomplishments. In the words of Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, speaking in 2014: “Perry is bipolar on wind. He plugged into when he saw he could get a political benefit. And now that the winds have changed in the Republican Party, he’s unplugged himself from one of his greatest environmental victories.” In fact, there are now serious moves in Texas to end the CREZ: Troy Fraser himself pushed to repeal the legislation, just as a new expansion of power lines is needed. (Luckily, it failed.) 

To conclude: Governor Perry has a great energy infrastructure record in Texas. He could take that national, get a lot of power lines built and greatly expand wind and solar without ever uttering a word about global warming or carbon emissions or whatever. And it would be an approach that his chief executive should like. Moreover, there is not a whole lot that Perry could or would do at DOE to hurt renewables. So consider it an upside bet.

A far-fetched one, considering that taking his legacy national would require political courage that Perry has never (AFAIK) demonstrated. But who knows? Hope springs eternal. And unlike some of the other cabinet picks, this one at least will probably do no harm. 

Has Google captured the Obama administration?

I am in Snoqualmie, Washington, outside Seattle, talking about intellectual property and hanging out with the same GOP-centric establishment crowds I always hang with on the West Coast.

One interesting comment came up in a discussion of whether, when and how to start lobbying the next administration against weakening patent rights: 

“The Clinton donor map and the Obama donor map are similar but not the same. The Clinton map skews south and east, with the hope that the next administration will be less Silicon Valley dominated than this one.” 

This is interesting on three levels. First, the belief that the Obama Administration is in Google’s pocket. Second, the belief that Hillary will not be in Google’s pocket. Third, that donor maps are determinative of political positions, at least on small-bore issues like patent reform.

Are these things true?

(These are Meg Whitman’s peeps. Only one Trump supporter among them.)

Open carry is insane

Seriously, letting people openly carry long-guns in urban areas is crazy. There is no self-defense scenario in which they would be useful. And if a terrorist starts shooting, having civilians carrying rifles will only put those civilians at risk.

Here in D.C., I am very glad that this fellow, who was just wandering around outside my office this evening, could be picked up by police. 

I will be curious to find out just what he thought he was doing. But more broadly, why have people now seized upon their right to sling rifles over their shoulders as a symbol of freedom? A long gun slung that way won’t even protect you from a mugger with a knife. It certainly won’t protect you from a police officer. Consider this enlightening video about what happens when a black man decides to exercise his open carry rights in a state (unlike D.C.) where open carry is legal. It did not seem to help the gentlemen in the video; nor did it help this man in Dallas. 

Would it be helpful to have more Turkish civilians firing AR-15s right now? Somehow, I do not think so. I would like to think that my skepticism comes directly from having carried a loaded M-16A2, but sadly having served in the U.S. military does not seem to innoculate people from this strange belief about the magic of long guns.

My experience leads me to extreme skepticism about their use in anything other than open infantry battles, organized patrols facing armed insurgents, or in equally-organized insurgent bands aimed against such patrols. But way many Americans with similar experience do not seem to draw that conclusion. 

Let’s grant for a moment that the United States government might turn into something worth raising armed insurgent bands to fight. I think that is somewhat less probable than as asteroid hitting the Earth, in that it would give decades of warning, but right now assume it could happen in an instant. Well, what the fuck would open carry get you? The weapons are useless until the rebels launch organized resistance; wandering around with one across your back beforehand just makes it easy for the government to identify a potential rebel. And once you have launched a war against the state, well, the open-carry laws are moot.

In other words, even if you grant the wingnut rationale, open carry makes no sense. 

JKR, do you have any thoughts on this? Andrew? Ivan? Other random readers with experience carrying loaded weapons in potential combat situations?

UPDATE: What the hell?

Why we can’t have nice things

 Environmental reviews in the United States have long passed the bounds of reasonableness. European countries, with far-better environmental protections, are still able to build large-scale infrastructure projects. The United States, not so much.

California is the biggest offender. But it is everywhere. The Purple Line is back in court over ... oh, man. A bridge is too big, and should be made smaller and more expensive. More vegetation needs to be planted between the tracks to reduce runoff. And, of course, we need to protect the Hay’s Spring and Kenk’s amphipod. 

I do not know how to build a political coalition to weaken the environmental laws. Democratic operatives tell me that they would in theory be open, but in practice do not trust the Republicans enough to start the process. Republicans tell me that they would obviously love to weaken the protections, but worry about a backlash from NIMBYs who like the laws for completely non-environmental reasons. But they dismiss Democratic worries as political piffle and say that if the Democrats would provide cover, their amendments would pass.

Either way, it is depressing. We have bad environmental laws that block needed projects for no public benefit, yet the political system is unable to reform them. One side fears losing the baby with the bathwater; the other dismisses those fears but says that a lot of their supporters like being able to throw dirty bathwater at people. Gaaaaaah.

Help one American colony, and you gotta hurt another, or something, plus Maryland drivers suck

 Speaker Ryan may be helping the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico against the wishes of his caucus, but man is he letting them fly their freak flag when it comes to the District of Columbia. One Republican basically said that if Washingtonians did not like it, we could go join Maryland.

Bah. I do not like the idea because of a profound culture difference: Maryland drivers are terrible. And I mean terrible in a unique nowhere-else-in-America kind of way.

I just got into a yelling match with an asshole in an SUV who pretended to threaten to run me down when my kids and I were walking in an alleyway that he had turned into illegally. Fucking idiot, by the way, had a goddamned parking enforcement vehicle behind him when he revved his engine and lunged at me and my kids as we were walking. Pendejo. It ended poorly for him, as you can imagine. 

I have had conversations with Marylanders in bars who admit to thinking pedestrians should get out of their way in crosswalks. Add that to the way they honk at anything, and it makes you almost long for Virginia. Really, the craziness drops a lot among cars with District plates and dries up across the Potomac. Unfortunately, I only live a few blocks from Maryland, so I have to deal with them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with drivers in that state? Disrespecting pedestrians and honking at everything. Where are we, Egypt? Brazil? Mexico City is becoming better than Maryland in this respect.

Note that I have lived in Boston and Miami. Marylanders do not drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. I drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. (Well, not Floridians.) Marylanders drive fine when it comes to signalling and stop signs and situational awareness and speed limits and respecting other vehicles ... well, except for the bloody honking. 

But while the honking is annoying, Marylanders deserve their own circle of hell for the way they treat pedestrians. WTF?

But despite these strong cultural differences with Maryland (do not get me started on their traitorious racist anthem) the actions of Congress are beginning to make me think that maybe retrocession would not be such a bad idea. 

I hope Bernie Sanders is talking cheap about Puerto Rico

 Short version: PROMESA would grant bankruptcy protection to Puerto Rico. (Since I hate these cutesy names Congress loves, I will henceforth call it the Puerto Rico Oversight Act.) But the bill would also put P.R. under a fiscal receivership. An Oversight Board appointed by the President of the United States from lists submitted by Congressional leaders. The Board would essentially take control of the island’s budget process. In return, the Board would get the power to take Puerto Rico’s creditors to bankruptcy court, including the holders of general obligation debt. (That suspends a provision of the Puerto Rican constitution.) The board would also have the power to suspend federal minimum wage laws.

The Oversight Act is a less-than-great deal, but it is also less than it seems. First, without it Puerto Rico’s creditors will tie the place up in lawsuits. Nobody wants a board forcing budget cuts, but it’s better than a bunch of vulture funds making the decisions. Second, Puerto Rico will have to cut its budgets in any case: it can’t afford to borrow any more. The Board might make stupid decisions, but austerity is sadly already backed in the cake. Third, Puerto Rico will be able to restructure general obligation bonds. That is more than most plans involved; in fact, it gives Puerto Rico a power that most states lack. (Although to be honest, the law on that is less than clear. Start with the 11th Amendment and go from there.)

Senator Sanders opposes the bill, calling it colonialism. And he’s right! It is.

But what’s his legislative strategy to replace it and replace it quickly? Because the bill is way better than the status quo. 

I don’t think he has a plan. I think this is an easy way to score political points, same as Senator Rubio did back when he was running for President. If it’s cheap talk, then I’m okay. But if he’s really mobilizing Democratic opposition, then he’s doing immense damage to the people of Puerto Rico and giving lots of power to hedge funds and their lawyers, aka “Wall Street billionaires.” 

It would be ironic if actual livelihoods weren’t in the balance. 

I would like to believe that the Senator from Vermont does indeed have a secret plan to get a better bill through, but I don’t.

Norms and D.C. statehood

 There has been a slow disintegration of political norms in America. Filibusters, for example, are now commonplace. So are holds on executive appointments. Motherhood bills are politicized. Frex, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Kentucky) is holding up a bill to fight the Zika virus for some partisan reason. Zika! 

Which makes me wonder. The next time Democrats have full control of Congress, it would be very easy to pass a D.C. statehood bill. That would give the Democrats two additional safe seats in the Senate and one in the House. Moreover, it would force the Republicans to support an additional constitutional amendment, lest the inhabitants of the rump District of Columbia receive three automatic electoral votes under the 23rd Amendment. 

Giving D.C. statehood vaguely feels like gerrymandering. In fact, that is what some prominent political scientists told me in a car in Chicago. But they also told me that they think suburban representatives like their influence over the District more than they like being in the majority, and that does not make sense.

So it would seem that the only reason for the next fully Democratic congress to refrain from making a District statehood bill job one would be a sense of propriety. And why would anyone care about that anymore?

Yet, somehow, my gut is that the Democrats won’t do this obvious thing the next time they have untrammeled power.

Why do I think that? I need some clarification to explain why my gut disagrees so strongly with my brain.

Trump on his website

 I cannot believe I actually did this. But I did. I went to his website and looked at his policy proposals.

On immigration, well, there is less than I would have expected. Nothing about mass deportation, only a bit about deporting more criminals. (Right now, ICE does not have the budgetary authority to deport all criminals after their sentences.) Some blather about repealing the 14th Amendment. Surprisingly, neither DACA nor DAPA appear. But there is a call for a wall ... and a clear statement that a Trump administration will wreck relations with Mexico all the way down to pulling out of NAFTA in order to pay for it. Expect a President Trump to destroy our southern relations. Which would be a shame, because right now Mexican governments of all stripe pretty much do whatever the United States needs them to do. 

On trade, he seems to be calling for a trade war with China. Except ... uh ... can he start one? He can declare China a currency manipulator. After which, well, lets go to the relevant part of the Omnibus Trade Act of 1988:

“If the Secretary considers that such manipulation is occurring with respect to countries that (1) have material global current account surpluses; and (2) have significant bilateral trade surpluses with the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury shall take action to initiate negotiations with such foreign countries on an expedited basis, in the International Monetary Fund or bilaterally, for the purpose of ensuring that such countries regularly and promptly adjust the rate of exchange between their currencies and the United States dollar to permit effective balance of payments adjustments and to eliminate the unfair advantage. The Secretary shall not be required to initiate negotiations in cases where such negotiations would have a serious detrimental impact on vital national economic and security interests; in such cases, the Secretary shall inform the chairman and the ranking minority member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate and of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs of the House of Representatives of his determination.”

Got that? The law will allow the Trump administration to ... start negotiations. Which is, to be fair, all he calls for on the website. 

There is also a fun bit where Trump contradicts himself within two sentences: “The U.S. Trade Representative recently filed yet another complaint with the WTO accusing China of cheating on our trade agreements by subsidizing its exports. The Trump administration will not wait for an international body to tell us what we already know. To gain negotiating leverage, we will pursue the WTO case and aggressively highlight and expose these subsidies.”

In other words, the Trump administration will not wait for an international body. Rather, it will pursue a case against China in an international body. Yes, tough indeed.

On taxes, it is all crazy. But that’s the GOP for you these days.

The whole thing is a little crazy, but I was expecting more. In other words, Trump has got a lot of room to walk back a lot of things once he gets the nomination ... with one exception: blowing up our relations with Mexico.

I concur with Carlos in comments.

Anyway, none of this is relevant for the Democrats, because the way to go after Trump is mockery. Pure, unending mockery. 

Could American parties become symmetric?

 One of the worst things about American politics over the past 30 years has been asymmetric polarization, where the GOP has moved far and fast to the right whereas the Democratic Party has stayed where it ever was, absent its southern conservative wing. 

I have long feared that the Democratic Party might go the same way as the GOP. This fear encountered two kinds of pushback:

1. It will not happen. The old Will Rogers joke will continue to hold: “I’m not a member of any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”
2. It will happen, but it’s a good thing! We need a Democratic Party stripped of its Liebermans and its Manchins and all those other squishes; the only way to fight fire is with fire.

Today Matt Yglesias made a brief for argument number (2). (To be fair, he did not say whether it would be a good thing or not.) He is arguing that younger voters want a more ideologically coherent Democratic Party. At some point, someone without the downsides of Bernie Sanders (like, say, Senator Elizabeth Warren) will give it to them.

Given the structure of the American constitution, I am torn. I can easily imagine how two ideologically coherent parties could wreck the country, even if they both had the best intentions. On the other hand, as a middle-aged guy from Brooklyn, I completely understand the logic of an eye for an eye; time to stop getting rolled and (more importantly) time to stop letting the conservative side shift the Overton Window. 

At the end of the day, though, having close Republican friends and relatives, my instinct is that it is a bad thing for the Democrats to imitate the GOP. If you want to become a national consensus party (like Canada’s Liberals) then mushy is what you want. 

But I do not think that will happen. I think we are headed towards two ideologically homogenous parties, and I do not think that will be a good thing for the country. Why am I wrong?

Reihan Salam needs to read the papers he cites

 I am generally in sympathy with Reihan Salam. (DISCLOSURE: I went to high school with his older sister, Rifat.) He’s an old-fashioned non-crazy conservative. I am not, but I sympathize with his pro-natalist and mildly-nationalist priors. I certainly support his skepticism about  government intervention and his arguments against zoning laws. And he wants to abolish Stuyvesant! What’s not to like?

But sometimes the poor guy just has to twist himself into knots in order to convince himself that the “conservative movement” to which he’s hitched his professional wagon isn’t batshit crazy. You can see him attempting to justify the recent nativist turn in the GOP here. 

Much of Salam’s article isn’t crazy. In fact, the entire first section is quite well argued. He says that the rise of Donald Trump is troubling and that the Republican leadership has no idea how to discuss immigration in an intelligent way.

If he had said the following in the second section I might disagree with the conclusion but not the analysis:

1. Admitting poor immigrants is not in the national interest;
2. It’s perfectly fine for Americans to want lower levels of immigration for whatever reason;
3. The current immigration backlash ain’t got nothing on the events of 1917-31, which gave us such gems as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and mob killings of Filipinos;
4. So the GOP should favor a Canada-style system with a lower overall cap and strict employment enforcement.

But that wasn’t the argument that Reihan made in the second section. Rather, his piece suddenly made a 90-degree turn and started to argue that the descendants of the post-1965 wave of immigration aren’t following the path of their predecessors from the Ellis Island wave.

Lest I be accused of misrepresenting his argument, let me quote him: “Why haven’t less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

His argument has two parts: one about economic mobility, the other about social assimilation. I’m going to focus on social assimilation, which Reihan states is happening much more slowly for current immigrants than for their European predecessors. We’ll briefly discuss the economics at the end.

1. Reihan Salam’s argument

One what does Reihan blame this alleged slow assimilation? Well, he asserts, “The most important reason that today’s immigrants have had such a different trajectory from those of earlier eras is that in 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that sharply curtailed immigration.”

Reihan goes on to talk about the Italians, who did indeed arrive in a single relatively short wave. (See the above figure.) Reihan: “The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp increases in inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other white ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that until recently was constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity.” The, same, he says, is happening to other goups. “Over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply.”

In other words, the reason behind the alleged difference between earlier immigration waves and the current one is that the current ones are continuously replenished by new immigrants. His sources are a book by Tomás Jiménez (Stanford) and a 2007 article by Zhenchao Qian (Ohio State) and Daniel Lichter (Cornell). Jiménez has an article that summarizes his main findings here.

And now comes the fisking you’ve all awaited. It is not that Jiménez, Qian and Lichter are bad scholars. They are great scholars. (Particularly Jiménez.) Reihan just gets their work wrong.

In fact, he gets their work so wrong that it’s hard to believe that he read them. (Rifat is a good sociologist — can I blame her for not schooling her little brother?)

2. Social assimilation

Let’s start with Jiménez. Jiménez has elsewhere pointed out the astonishingly high outmarriage rates of Mexican-Americans! Moreover, Jiménez points out that those outmarriage rates have risen for second and third-generation Mexican-Americans, despite the continual waves of new immigration. In other words, Mexican exogamy has proven resilient to replenishment.

Jiménez’s argument is that replenishment inflames native-born non-Mexican irritation at new Mexican arrivals, which spills over into over into continued prejudice directed at native-born Mexican-Americans. Let me quote Jiménez’s three conclusions:

1. “First, non-Mexicans’ expressions of nativism sharpen inter-group boundaries.” Reihan could have said that immigration makes natives act like racist basterds, and it is a bad thing to be a racist basterd, so to discourage racist basterdism we should cut immigration. That is a perfectly legitimate argument. But it makes the GOP base look bad, so Reihan doesn’t make it.
2. “Second, immigrant replenishment bolsters the salience of race in the lives of respondents. In a context of heavy Mexican immigration, non-Mexicans use racial markers as proxies for a combination of ancestry, nativity, and legal status.” Again, this makes the GOP look bad, so Reihan misrepresents Jiménez’s argument.
3. “Finally, Mexican-immigrant replenishment sharpens intra-group boundaries by informing the criteria for ‘authentic’ expressions of ethnic identity. Mexican immigrants and the young second generation have come to define and police ‘Mexicanness,’ which entails, at the very least, speaking Spanish and having non-Anglo American tastes. Mexican immigrants and young second-generation individuals call into question respondents’ authenticity for not being able to openly display the cultural characteristics that might ‘prove’ their ethnic authenticity. Mexican Americans respond to these boundaries by attempting to avoid them altogether, and by providing a corrective to those who impose such boundaries. Respondents attempt to avoid inter-group boundaries by emphasizing their American national identity.” And that italicized conclusion is the opposite of what Reihan implies Jiménez argues.

Aaargh!

To be fair, Jiménez does argue that Mexican migration is unlike the Ellis Island waves that produced the Brooklyn I grew up in. But Jiménez is not arguing that there is anything unprecedented about the continuing stream of Mexican migration. Rather, he explicitly points out that both the Germans and the Irish immigrated in century-long waves; if you want historical parallels to Mexican-Americans, those two groups are the ones you should look to. And if you wanna talk about hard-to-assimilate waves of endless immigration, by a people who had no reluctance to use politics to cram multiculturalism down the throats of hard-working English-speaking Americans, then you really wanna look at the Germans. (You gotta scroll down at the link for the relevant information.)

Reihan writes, however, as if the Italians were the first immigrant group to get off the boat in America.

Hey, Reihan’s from Brooklyn, I’m from Brooklyn, to some extent it’s understandable. I went to college honestly believing that a third of all the white people in America were of Italian descent. I mean this literally: my friend Dev Patnaik cracked open an encyclopedia and disabused me of that notion. (For some reason, I knew that my personal experience about the number of Jewish-Americans was not representative, but it never occurred to me that this might also be true of the cujines.) I completely get why Reihan might assume that the Italian experience is the normal expected baseline for the American immigrant experience.

But I was 18 and a college freshman. Salam is 36 and a major public intellectual.

Now let’s move on to Qian and Lichter’s findings. Compare column (1) and column (2) below. For people aged 20-34, intermarriages among native-born Asian-American men fell from 50% to 46%, while intermarriages among Asian-American women rose from 58% to 60%.

This is not the decline Salam writes about.

Moreover, column (2) excludes multiracial people. If you classify anyone who checks off the boxes as half-white as minority — i.e., you classify people the way the 1990 census did — you would compare column (1) and column (4) and find that between 1990 and 2000 interracial marriages for native-born Asian-American men rose from 50% to 55% and for women from 58% to 67%.

Nor do Qian and Lichter believe that intermarriage rates have declined for Latinos. They spell out why on page 85, where they attempt to account for confounding demographic shifts. Bottom line: “Intermarriage with whites increased significantly among native-born Asian Americans and Hispanics, by 36 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Significantly, these multivariate results are different from the modest 1990s’ declines in intermarriage reported in Table 2.”

Heck, Qian and Lichter don’t even find a decline in intermarrige for foreign-born Asian-Americans! Page 86: “Intermarriage ratios with native-born whites declined by 19 percent for foreign-born Hispanics, from 27 to 22, and increased by only 11 percent for foreign-born Asians, from 28 to 31, during the 1990s.” It is true that Qian and Lichter find the increase in intermarriage rates for foreign-born Asians smaller than they would have expected given the increase in the number of foreign-born Asians: in other words, they did find that foreign-born Asian-Americans became somewhat less likely to marry non-Asian native-born Americans between 1990 and 2000 when you control for everything else. But that seems a pretty small reed upon which to argue that assimilation slowed down during the 1990s.

3. Economic mobility

Reihan also talks about the skill level of immigrants and their economic success, but he makes no explicit time-series comparisons. All he does is point out that immigrants are disproportionately poor after which he asks, “Why haven’t recent less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

But that question makes no sense unless and until you establish that current immigrant waves are moving up the occupational and wage ladder more slowly than previous waves! Reihan does not do this. So I don’t have that much to say, other than that there is in fact a big literature on these issues. A not-bad place to start. For some economic history on the Ellis Island wave, see here. For even better economic history on the same topic, see this paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan and Katherine Eriksson. For a broader look at current assimilation, see this piece by the very same Tomás Jiménez. For a complex long-term view, see this 2006 study by Jacob Vigdor (currently at the University of Washington). See also this NBER chapter on Mexican-Americans. Finally, this is a great short book comparing Italians from 1900 with Mexican migrants today.

Ironically, that latter three provide some support for Reihan’s underlying argument. To which, I repeat, I have some sympathy and could be convinced to support.

4. Summing up

In short, I am disappointed. Immigration restriction is a reasonable position. And I generally like Salam’s positions. Repeal zoning! Tax the childless! Good stuff, logical, makes America better. But I am saddened by this piece. It misrepresents facts in order to allow Salam to call for the Republican Party to address a cultural assimilation crisis that does not exist, except inasmuch as immigration is generating a native-born white backlash.

There is nothing wrong with the GOP being the party of immigration restriction. There is a lot wrong with the insane racist way that immigration restriction has come out in the 2016 primary race. Maybe you can justify the insanity, but Reihan only does so by misrepresenting the works he cites. For a broader takedown, using sources that Reihan doesn’t cite, see Alex Nowrasteh here.

I wag my finger at you, Reihan Salam of Brooklyn! Or in our shared old school vernacular, “You serious, B? Gedouttahere.”

Unpublished post from August 22, 2013: The GOP, Latinos, and Chris Christie

There is a bit of a controversy over the GOP and immigration reform. Mitt Romney did terribly among Latinos, as do Republican candidates in general. The question is why. Many observers, including many Republicans, ascribe it to Republican immigrant-bashing, also known as racism. “Self-deportation” and all that.

There is a counter-argument, advanced by both liberals and conservatives, that the problem lies in other GOP policies. To get Latinos to vote Republican, either the internal demographics of Latinos would have to change or the GOP would need to alter core political stances other than their incessant dog-whistling to white nationalists. In that view, then, the dog-whistling is a pure plus: it gets white votes that might otherwise go uncast without losing many Latino ones.

I go back-and-forth on this. On the one hand, I know a lot of Latino conservatives who are put off by GOP insanity. On the other hand, I also know a lot of non-Latino conservatives who are put off by GOP insanity.

So ... one test case is New Jersey. There, Governor Christie leads among white voters, but is slightly behind among Latinos, 41-43 against Barbara Buono.

Thing is, Governor Christie has not engaged in any racist dog-whistling. And his persona goes over well with Latinos. This above picture is me in front of Mr. Otero’s house in Queens. Mr. Otero has told me that he likes Governor Christie. But ... I have trouble believing that he would vote for the man. (And no, not just because he does not live in New Jersey.) Why? Well, look at this picture of the house, without me taking up space:

Close-up:

You see a lot of those stickers in Queens.

Immigration reform? A good thing. And probably a net gain for the GOP. But I am not sure that it would drastically change much of anything. The party has other problems.

Why Obamacare will be hard to repeal

 Congress just managed to send an Obamacare-repeal bill to the President’s desk via reconciliation. Does that cause me to alter my opinion that Obamacare is pretty much safe even if President Cruz takes office with GOP majorities in 2017?

No.

You see, the bill doesn’t really repeal Obamacare. Rather, it repeals the subsidies for policies bought on the exchanges, repeals the Medicaid expansion, and repeals the Obamacare taxes, including the fine (er, “tax”) for failing to buy insurance. 

Which means that the bill leaves in community rating. So ... insurance companies will still be prohibited from price discriminating or denying coverage, but there will be no incentives (be it positive subsidies or negative fines) to keep healthy people inside the system. Bring on the health insurance death spiral!

A death spiral for health insurance would also be a death spiral for the party in power. The GOP, therefore, would need both Democratic support and a carefully considered alternative to proceed with Obamacare repeal. Since I suspect neither will be forthcoming (at least not under President Cruz) then I also do not think that the GOP will repeal Obamacare.

I could be wrong. The GOP might be unable to restrain itself from taking a suicidal leap.

They might console themselves that Thomas Buchmueller and John DiNardo (U-Mich) found that community rating did not cause a death spiral in New York State between 1993 (when it was implemented) and 1996. Rather, it led to a switch towards HMOs. That switch, however, has already occurred nationwide.

The end result in New York was not good. By the time it had run its course in New York, the death spiral did not result in death, but rather in a market that was astonishingly expensive (page 38 of this report) and effectively had no individual insurance market at a price anyone below the 90th income percentile could afford.

So it is possible that the GOP would go full crazy and repeal via reconciliation. That would hurt a lot of people of course, but Democrats could console themselves by retaking Congress in 2018 and consigning President Cruz to a single term. Which is why full-on Obamacare repeal is not the way I would bet.

President Ted Cruz and the Clean Power Plan

 Actually, when I first presented this analysis out in Palo Alto, it was President Marco Rubio. And I still have a not-entirely-rational soft spot for my man from Miami. But right now the senator from Texas is looking slightly more likely. 

Not that it matters. First, Marco Rubio is a Republican, and one of the many sad things about the current Republican party is that they are all identical on the subject of carbon emissions. As in, they don’t care. Bush, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Trump no difference. 

Second, American regulatory law is set up to make it essentially impossible for an incoming president to repeal regulation short of changing the underlying  legislation. Agencies issue regulations because Congress realized that laws could not be written to cover every contingency as if they were simple algorithms. The big legislation governing the process is the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, which deliberately slows down the rulemaking process to allow for comment periods ... which is when lobbyists work their magic. Sadly, the magic does not involve hanging out in hotel lobbies with expensive cigars. Rather, it involves “expert” testimony designed to influence the final rule. 

Presidents can order agencies to create rules or repeal them, but the latter is almost impossible given the administrative process. On the other hand, they have widespread authority to grant exemptions and slow walk implementation. So ...

President Rubio Cruz could:

1. Slow walk approval of state plans, or allow plans based on dubious assumptions to be approved;
2. Grant extensions to states with high concentrations of coal plants (KY and WV);
3. Allow Congress to overturn the existing plan via the Congressional Review Act of 1996. If the GOP gets a 60-seat majority of the Senate in ‘16, this trumps all else.

In other words, absent a filibuster-proof majority (or a GOP abolition of the institution) the options are limited. But they will be even more limited if the Obama adminstration manages to complete before January 2017 the rule governing what will happen should a state reject the Clean Power Plan. Right now, the plan is to default those states to a cap-and-trade system, the kind of thing that President McCain would have initiated. 

That would worsen the Rubio Cruz dilemma.

Consider the marginal firm under a cap-and-trade system where permits are allocated rather than auctioned. Before a cap-and-trade system, that firm was making $X per ton of CO2. Under cap-and-trade, the cost of carbon abatement = the price of a permit, call it $Y.

The firm will either spend $Y, reduce emissions and earn $Y from selling its permit … or it will just use its permit. It still makes $X.

That is for the marginal firm. Some firms will lose, because for those firms the cost per ton of abatement will be greater than $Y. They will need to pay the additional costs or buy more permits. But for a lot of firms, the cost of abatement will be less than $Y. And those firms will be better off under cap-and-trade than they were before: they will pay the cost of abatement and free up permits for sale. One the system is in place, they will mobilize to keep it in place. And that will wreck the politics of global warming denialism.

I suspect that a President Cruz might barrel ahead regardless. The good news is that Cruz will hurt his own re-election chances. Rubio or Trump is more likely to acquiesce to the political reality. 

The rub is that much depends on the ability of the Obama administration to get the rules out before January (more realistically, November) and that is by no means certain. 

In short:

1. A GOP president will likely do nothing if a cap-and-trade system comes in, unless he or she does not care about being re-elected in 2020.
2. If there is no cap-and-trade system, he or she will be able to do a lot of damage around the margins, but not destroy the reforms.
3. Unless we get 60 GOP senators, in which case all bets are off.

Is this helpful? I will change my blogging voice to suit; clarity is important.

A happy Christmas present from Paul Ryan

 I have many pieces of fashion advice for American males, but one is above all. If you do want to have to think about the impression you are making ... if you have no desire to engage in mental calculus about appropriate accessories ... if you truly detest thinking about the audience but know that they matter ... then base your wardrobe on Republican elected officials. (While they are in office, of course.) They have done all the complex calculus with the lowest common denominator in mind. If they can wear it, then so can you, in pretty much any circumstance. 

And so, I would like to thank Paul Ryan for finally bringing the trim goatee into the mainstream. And I mean the total mainstream, killing any last bit of edginess or risk. Mazeltov, Mr. Speaker! 

I would also like to thank Speaker Ryan for the recent budget bill. First, how can I possibly thank you enough for tossing out the shibboleth of balanced budgets? I cannot! And given your own history, my thanks goes double. 

Second, we now have a five-year extension on the windpower production tax credit! And the solar ITC for six years! Hoo-ah!

Not one, not two, but three gifts from the Republicans! Wind, solar, and beards. (I am going to grow one right now.) Sometimes, America works.

I invite opposing views in comments, particular from the people arguing with me about my recent GOP-love in our respective inboxes. 

Do all paths to a Trump victory run through Michigan?

 I think so, but there are reasons to believe that is wrong.

Sean Trende has an electoral simulator not unlike my own. Of course, I cannot get into his code, so I’m not sure what the underlying assumptions are about demographic change in 2012-16. But here is what you get if you assume that African-American and white turnout will return to 2004 levels, while the GOP loses one-third of the Latino votes that Romney got in 2012.

Oh, wait, that is the same as the 2012 map. For the GOP to win, even under the above assumptions, you need to up its share of national white vote from 60% to 64%. His model shows Virginia flipping at 62%, Florida and  Ohio at 63%, and then Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Wisconsin for the win at 64%.

I think the difference is that I assume (based on past elections) that the white vote in the Badger State is far stickier than those flighty white people over in Michigan.

In the Trende model, a 3-point uniform swing with high white turnout will swing Wisconsin but not Michigan. That does not seem unreasonable, but it gets you the rather odd electoral map on the right.

Of course, if you assume that Trump will lose half the Latino and Asian-American vote, as opposed to a third of the former and none of the latter, then all the above assumptions won’t help. Under the Trende model, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia flip, but the Democratic candidate still wins.

I do not really believe a scenario in which Virginia flips that early despite a crash in the GOP share of the Latino and Asian-American vote, but Trende is paid to do this stuff and I am not. He is also very smart. And the general result seems to hold. For a GOP candidate to win while alienating minorities, they need an electoral path right through the old Rust Belt, be it Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania. 

It is interesting to run the table in the other direction: at what swing among white voters do Democrats start expanding the 2008 map? (Moving the needle on Latinos and Asians alone flips only North Carolina.) That map is regained at 43% of white voters nationally, a three-point swing over 2012. (In 2008, exit polls showed Barack Obama winning a solid majority of white votes outside the old Confederacy.) At 46%, Georgia and Missouri flip. Arizona goes blue at 47%. Texas joins them at 49%, along with Montana and the Dakotas. Finally, at a ten-point uniform swing among white voters Mississippi and South Carolina vote Democratic ... even though that means the Republican is still getting almost 80% of white voters in those states.

The sad thing, though, is realizing how unlikely it seems that any Democrat could get as high a vote share as 20% in those states. I find it much much easier to imagine the entire Rust Belt swinging red than the deep south going blue, let alone Texas. 

An embarrassing oversight

 Dammit! I missed an opportunity, it seems.

Kevin Drum pointed out a great paper that demonstrates that Southern whites moved to the GOP for racial reasons. (Basically, the move is concentrated among people who told pollsters that they would never vote for a black man for President and invariant to other things.) 

Why am I annoyed? Because I was at the conference where that paper was first presented. (See photo above.) Bah!

Can a Republican take Michigan in 2016?

 No.

At least no orthodox Republican. Not Jeb, not Marco, not Ted, not even the Kasich.

But here is what could give the GOP hope. From prowling around through exit poll data (from Fox News) and the overall turnout numbers, it is possible to back out how many people voted in each racial group in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Short version: white turnout plunged from 68% in 2008 to 61% in 2012. Get those voters back and get a bit over 59% of them to vote Republican and the GOP can take the state ... even if the Republican candidate loses a third of the Latino vote share relative to Romney, even if blacks vote in the same numbers as in 2008, and even with the projected decline in the white share of eligible voters from 80% to 79%.*

That is the basis for the numbers in the previous post. (In a typo, the post as written only gave the numbers for Pennsylvania.)

So far, so good for the GOP. It makes the state look within Donald Trump’s grasp. Who knows? Maybe his nativist protectionist populism could energize disillusioned white Michiganders and swing the state.

But here is the rub. Back in 2008, when all those white people in Michigan went to the polls, Barack Obama won 51% of their votes. In 2012, when many of them stayed home, Barack Obama won only 44% of their votes. There is no reason to think that the disillusioned white voters of Michigan lean Republican. 

That is not, of course, what Sean Trende thinks. He guessed that the missing white people might have gone 70-30 to the GOP. But unless the Fox exit polls are wildly off (and they might be) I do not see where he gets that guess from, other than that most of the disillusioned voters live in rural and exurban areas.

So while I stand by my numbers (with apologies for reporting only the PA results) ... I also admit that it is wildly unlikely that any Republican could get Michigan. Upping white turnout while upping the white GOP vote share looks close to Mission Impossible.

Considering the above evidence, if anyone is going to get the missing white voters to go back to the polls and vote for them, then they had better have some wildly heterodox thing to offer them. And the Donald, well, he is nothing if not heterodox. More so in the general, when he no longer has to worry (inasmuch as he bothers to now) about Republican orthodoxy. 

No, I do not believe it could work. Certainly not when executed by Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. But it is a possible path to victory, no?

Back to you, Doug.

Could Donald Trump win in November?

 So Macri won in Argentina! A commentator here compared him to Donald Trump. But that is not right, although I can see why Shah8 made the comparison. Macri is anti-abortion, but abortion is still illegal in Argentina, and abortion isn’t really a Trump issue. Macri is also anti-immigrant, but very mildly so compared to Trump. His biggest contretemps was back in 2010, when he blamed a wave of accidents in illegal textile factories on immigration. The thing to remember, though, is that Argentina is far more open to immigrants than the United States. Unless you believe that countries have no right to control migration, then it is very hard to paint Macri as beyond the pale.

But the Donald, whoa. He is beyond the pale. But can he win anyway?

Well, Bruce Bartlett tried to show one path in the Washington Post. The thing is, Bartlett’s piece is one of those things that sounds good to a white person who is probably well-meaning but hasn’t actually spoken to any black people. Sure, some hypothetical candidate might be able to win black votes on a nativist platform. Donald Trump is most emphatically not that candidate. 

Quite the reverse, actually. Like Scott Walker, Trump would serve to insure black turnout remains at 2012 levels regardless of anything Hillary does. Getting black votes is not how the Donald wins in November.

But how could he win? Let’s think about two scenarios. In the first, Trump manages to hold the bleeding of Latino votes to only a third below Romney’s numbers. In that world, Nevada and Florida are out of reach. Colorado is marginally possible, but not worth the effort. Ditto Virginia. (He would need to increase his share of the white vote in Virginia from 61% to 67%. That is not impossible — white people in North Carolina vote Republican in those numbers — but it would not be a sensible use of resources.

Rather, his path lies through the old industrial midwest, plus Iowa and New Hampshire. He would need to beat the Romney margin among white voters by 3 points (from 57% to 60%) 4 points in Michigan (from 55% to 59%) and 3 points in Pennsylvania (from 57% to 60%), but it is theoretically possible. It is not a path that any sane campaign strategist would want to attempt. But it is a path, and if Trump is willing to play that old protectionist music plus some immigration hysteria, it is one that he could pull off. (And to be honest, in a world where he is winning Pennsylvania, I am pretty sure that he would in fact get Virginia along for the ride.)

But it requires that Trump hold his share of the Asian vote and lose only one-third of Latinos. In the second scenario, he also loses one-third of Asian-Americans. In that world, Trump will need to outdo Romney among whites by about a point in order to hold Arizona and North Carolina, while Virginia will move even further out of reach. Romney got 62% and 68% of whites in Arizona or North Carolina; is there room to increase the white vote share? 

Surprisingly, hemorrhaging Latino votes to half a Romney won’t make it that much harder than losing Asian-American votes. The industrial midwest won’t be affected significantly outside Ohio; his battles in Arizona and N.C. will become a little bit harder. (A 1% increase in white votes in N.C.; a 3% increase in Arizona.) 

In short, Donald Trump is very unlikely to win in November if he gets the GOP nomination. But his path is not impossible. It would involve some unorthodox campaigning ... but what else have we been seeing these last few months? So GOP voters, if you like him, please go vote for him.

ADDENDUM: The map above has been corrected; it originally miscolored Alaska and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. (The electoral vote counts were correct.) In addition, Doug in comments has asked me to explain the Michigan calculation. How could a 4% shift in white votes swing a state that Barack Obama won by 9½ points? We will take that up in a second post!

A very short liveblogging of the Republican debate

 No, no fisking. No point in that! This is the Republican debate.

But it is weird to watch two very smart politicians, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, have this big long debate about bank bailouts without recognizing that there is in fact this thing called deposit insurance.

The reason that it is weird is that both could score points by mentioning it. Senator Cruz, after Neil Cavuto said that he would let small depositors go hang if he did not bail out the banks: “Mr. Cavuto, I would not bail out the bankers! But your premise is wrong, as you should know! Those depositors are protected by insurance and they would not be harmed.”

Or John Kasich, once Cruz screwed up: “Philosophy, shilosophy.” I paraphrase my favorite Republican. “Senator Cruz, why would you take away the deposit insurance that Americans have counted on to protect them from the government subsidized bankers? That would be crazy!” 

It is a little weird and more than a little surprising.

Everyone seems tired, not just Governor Bush. Were they all out late last night?

The war on fuel efficiency continues

 It is true that as an abstract economic principle, the case for tightening fuel-efficiency standards in American cars will remain strong even if oil prices remain low. 

But this is a case where politics matters more. The rules are up for review in 2017. President Clinton will maintain them. President Rubio will not, although he may not weaken them by as much as people think for the simple reason that the automakers prefer national rules than the segmented market that would result if the feds loosened the 54.5 mpg-by-2025 target.

The basic problem is that California can set its own air-quality rule, which are then automatically followed by Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. It does not set fuel-efficiency standards per se, but it can reject federal rules that are not consistent with its goals. If the feds loosen the 2025 standards, then California is likely to tighten its air-quality regulations in a way that effectively raises the fuel efficiency standards.

Auto companies will not like that. The upshot is that President Rubio would likely loosen the goals if oil prices remain low, but not abolish them altogether. 

Anyway, Saudi Arabia still seems to be aiming for low oil prices. Whether that is a sensible bet remains to be seen.

Fear the Kasich

 There is a solid psephological reason why Democrats should fear John Kasich.

In a first-past-the-post system like the United States, where the plurality winner of an election takes it all, parties have two strategies to win election. The first is base mobilization. The second is to appeal to the median voter. To some extent, these are contradictory: doing what you need to get the true believers to the polls reduces the party’s appeal to the median voter.

In presidential elections, both parties have tried versions of both appeals, but the GOP has relied more on base mobilization. Unfortunately for them, their base is shrinking in presidential electorates. Fortunately for them, however, they no longer need to worry about irritating their base.

Consider the below graph of popular vote margins in 22 swing states in the 2012 elections. Notice the asymmetry? The GOP won by a margin of 7.8% in its second-closest state, Georgia. That is a very large margin. A strategy that depressed its base would really only put North Carolina at risk, even with the demographic changes since 2012.

On the other hand, the Democrats won a lot of states by razor-thin margins. They won Florida (0.9%), Ohio (3.0%), Virginia (3.9%), Colorado (5.4%), Pennsylvania (5.4%), New Hampshire (5.6%), Iowa (5.8%), Nevada (6.7%), Wisconsin (6.9%) and Minnesota (7.7%) by smaller margins than with which the GOP won Georgia. 

In other words, the GOP has nothing to lose by switching from a base-mobilization strategy to a median-voter strategy. Their primary electorate has made that difficult, however. One of the only two candidates with a moderate front besides Kasich has the unfortunate last name of Bush and an extreme record on reproductive rights. Kasich is no moderate on abortion, but he has two advantages over Jeb Bush. First, there is no Kasich equivalent of the Schiavo insanity that Governor Bush gave us. Second, most of Kasich’s anti-abortion positions are popular, or at least not unpopular. (The people on my email list may disagree with this, and I hope they chime in to explain why I am wrong.) Kasich may finally run into the wall with the bill in Ohio to ban abortions for fetuses with Downs Syndrome, but I would not count on it if I were a Democratic strategist. 

Nor is he extreme on climate change. Oh, he probably will slow-walk the Clean Power Plan. (If anyone asks, I will explain what a GOP president could and could not do in another post.) But he won’t run on that, and inasmuch as people understand his position it won’t be unpopular: consider the recent vote in the California legislature. It stripped out the transportation mandates ... meaning the hard part of reducing Californian carbon emissions. And that was in the Golden State.

Add to that the fact that a Kasich candidacy takes a lot of base-mobilizing issues for Democrats off the table. Obamacare? Finally safe. (It is even if Bush or Rubio wins, but Kasich can credibly say that the battle is over once we are out of primary season.) Criminal justice reform? Check. Immigration? Well, Kasich has a problem with his calls to alter the 14th Amendment ... but let me be real. He can walk that back in the general. Latinos will not like him, but he is well-placed to pivot. 

GOP doyens realize that they have reached the end of the base-mobilization strategy. Their problem is that they have settled on a candidate, Jeb Bush, who will have some serious trouble pivoting to a median-voter strategy. (In part, I think, this is because the doyens whom I have met have some very strange ideas about where the median voter lies in this country. To give a trite example, the non-Texan ones that I have met honestly think that “fat cat banker” is a powerful anti-capitalist epithet.) 

What they do not realize, however, is that there is a pocketbook conservative on the ballot who really can swing median voters the old-fashioned way. And as Logan has argued, Donald Trump may be in the process of giving that candidate his shot. 

Is Trump doing the GOP a favor?

 Logan Ferree here. We’ve been talking about the upcoming Republican primary election. In general, the Donald has not been good for the GOP. 

But there is a scenario in which he helps his party in the fall. 

If Trump melts down before the primaries begin, which our gut keeps telling us is likely, then Jeb Bush is the most likely nominee. He’ll face a flavor-of-the-month conservative, but it’s unlikely that Senator Rubio or Governor Kasich will be able to consolidate support against Jeb’s huge pile of money. The GOP will go into the fall with a relatively mediocre nominee. Obviously, he has a solid chance to win in the fall. But he is not a sure thing against Secretary Clinton. And Jeb will have a hard time undoing the damage Trump has done to the Republicans’ image with Latino voters.

But if Trump hangs on — which our heads are now unexpectedly telling us is probable — then the dynamic changes. John Kasich becomes the most likely mainstream nominee. And Kasich is a man whom the Democrats should fear in the fall. 

Consider that the pattern in 2012 was one in which a succession of not-Romney candidates got enough media attention to become the primary choice for disgruntled Republicans. But Romney had the consistent name ID advantage. The not-Romneys were all flawed and flamed out, one by one. 

In 2016, with Trump barreling on, the question will become who can be the not-Trump candidate with enough media attention to consolidate the not-crazy vote. 

What would be needed would be a breakout performance, either in the debates or the early primary states. An example would be Newt Gingrich’s performance in the debate of January 9, 2012. Another would be Rick Santorum’s sweep of the three Midwest states on February 7th. The difference, of course, is that in 2016 it would be one of the three mainstream candidates breaking out as the Not-Trump rather than one of the alternative candidates breaking out as the Not-Romney. That would mean one of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich. (We are assuming that Scott Walker will continue his slow decline. That seems a safe assumption.)

The party establishment and donor class would be standing ready to grab whichever mainstream candidate looks to be gaining momentum, which would then in fact actually give them momentum. Unlike the not-Romneys of 2012, a breakout not-Trump of 2016 would be able to go the distance.

Why do I think that dynamic favors Kasich?

It is not that John Kasich can win New Hampshire. Kasich can easily win New Hampshire; too easily, in fact.  Breakouts involve beating expectations: right now, in September 2011, the conventional wisdom is already moving towards a Kasich win in the Granite State. So a Kasich win in New Hampshire is unlikely to become a breakout if it’s followed by Trump or Carson wins in the South. 

But coming off New Hampshire, there are a series of primaries in states with moderate GOP electorates where Kasich can beat expectations. The big month will be March with Michigan (March 8th), Ohio (March 15th), Florida (March 15th), and Illinois (March 15th). 

If Kasich sweeps the Midwest and Bush and Rubio split Florida, then Kasich could get the attention and the donors and go on to win Wisconsin and the moderate states in April. It’s hard to see how Bush or Rubio could engineer a similar breakout that late in the game, but Jeb does have a bloody lot of money so I wouldn’t count it out.

I’m not saying that Kasich will win in this scenario. I am saying that unless Jeb can do something unexpected to leverage his giant pile of money or Trump flames out before the voting starts, then Kasich the best chance of the three mainstream candidates.

Conclusion: Donald Trump may actually be helping the GOP win in November! John Kasich is a scary candidate. So by increasing the chances that the party’s strongest general-election candidate will win the nomination, Trump is doing Republicans a favor.

Caveat: I cannot shake the feeling that Trump cannot possibly survive as a serious candidate for much longer. He just seems ... impossible. But he has come this far already, no? 

It should be a show.

Uphill for the GOP, but not impossible

 Will Baird asked why I don’t analyze how Republicans other-than-Walker would do against Senator Sanders. It occurs to me that the reason is this: any Republican candidate faces an uphill battle in 2016. Not an impossible one, not by any means. But uphill. 

Let’s pretend for a moment that the Democratic candidate fails to inspire African-American voters, so their turnout falls back to 2004 levels. This is unlikely on multiple levels, but it could happen.

Then let’s imagine that the GOP candidate is one of the following: Bush, Kasich, or Rubio. They have a fighting chance of getting Latino votes back up at the level of John McCain. 

What kind of swing, then, does the GOP nominee need to generate among white voters to win? The below numbers give the Republican the Latino vote share of John McCain, when available, or assume a four-point swing when not. (Four points is the national McCain performance over Romney among Latino voters.) 

	EVs	Cumulative GOP EVs	White vote swing needed for GOP victory
North Carolina	15	206	-1%
Ohio	18	224	1%
Wisconsin	10	234	2%
Michigan	16	250	2%
Pennsylvania	20	270	2%
Colorado	9	279	3%
Virginia	13	292	4%
Iowa	6	298	4%
New Hampshire	4	302	4%
Florida	29	321	5%
Nevada	6	327	6%

This is quite doable for the Republican candidate. It requires a big white vote share — 57% in Colorado, 65% in Virginia, 66% in Florida — but not an impossible one. Voters in those states are flightier than in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania: it would be easier to generate a big white swing in Virginia than a small one in Pennsylvania. But both can be done.

It just won’t be easy to do it. And remember, the above numbers simply wave away the party’s problems with black and Latino voters.

That is the reason why Bernie Sanders even has a chance at all: the structural weakness of the GOP in presidential elections.

What if black voters really don’t like Bernie Sanders?

 Let me start with the odd statement that I disagree with the premise of this post. over on James Nicoll’s blog, a fellow named David Wilford took issue with Bernie Sanders’ ability to get black voters to come to the polls. I think that’s wrong: Scott Walker angers blacks like you would not believe and there would be a long time for the Sanders campaign to learn and mobilize.

But what if he’s right?  

Let’s start with black turnout in the past few election cycles:

 

Voting turnout has been on an upward secular trend even in off-elections. So it is certainly plausible that something other than having Barack Obama on the ballot is going on.

Let’s dig a little further. In 2004, 60.0% of black citizens voted. In 2008, that ratio rose to 64.7%. In 2012, it rose again to 66.2%.

So let’s imagine that voting rates fall all the way back to 2004 levels. That would take the black share of the vote to 11.8% instead of the projected 13%. How much of a vote swing would the GOP candidate to generate in order to win?

	EVs	Sanders EVs	White vote swing needed for GOP victory
Nevada	6	207	9%
Florida	29	236	6%
Colorado	9	245	5%
Virginia	13	258	5%
Wisconsin	10	268	3%
Michigan	16	284	3%
Pennsylvania	20	304	2%
Ohio	18	322	1%
North Carolina	15	337	0%

Now, these numbers assume that the Republican candidate cannot build on Mitt Romney’s numbers among Latino and Asian-American voters. For Scott Walker, that’s a given. For Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, not so much.

A Sanders victory against Walker, however, does not rely on energized black voters. It becomes harder without them, obviously, but not impossible. He needs to hold the Republican to a 3-point swing among white voters; call it a half-Reagan. Right now, Sanders leads polls against Walker, so I cannot see why this would be impossible even in an atmosphere of depressed black turnout.

Map created at 270toWin.com

But  let me repeat: Scott Walker is such an energizing figure among black Americans that I would bet on any Democrat replicating Barack Obama’s numbers if Walker is the candidate. And thus, I continue to maintain that Sanders would lose against Bush or Rubio, albeit less than a landslide, and win against Scott Walker.

Can Bernie Sanders win in 2016?

 Yes. It would be hard, but it is not science fiction.

An earlier post showed how many states Bernie Sanders would win in an absolute general election wipeout. In reality, such a wipeout is impossible. Consider the strongest post-1980 Republican candidacies in each major demographic group. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 66% of the white vote. Robert Dole won 12% of the black vote. (Actually, Ford won 17% in 1976 and Reagan got 14% in 1980, but no Republican has come that close since.) George W. Bush won 44% of the Latino vote and 43% of Asian-Americans. If our hypothetical Rubio campaign managed to match all those numbers against Sanders, he would get only 55% of the vote. If he matched all those numbers and managed to get minority turnout back to 2004 levels he would get 56%. Now that is a big margin, but it is not 59%.

Moreover, no Republican is going to get 44% of the Latino vote in 2016. Maybe if immigration reform has passed, but that ship has sailed. Even Rubio would do well to match John McCain, which would give him an eight-point margin against Sanders; ten points if minority turnout collapses. 

An eight-point margin for the GOP means a ten-point swing compared to 2012, which gets us the map on the right. (Link to 2012 state margins.) This map jibes with what we know from head-to-head polling questions that pit Sanders against Scott Walker in the general election. Those state polls show Sanders losing to Walker in Colorado (8 points), Iowa (8 points), Michigan (4 points), Ohio (10 points), Pennsylvania (5 points), and Virginia (8 points). Sanders was only matched up against Rubio in a poll in Colorado, in which case he lost by 11 points. 

This is the actual floor on a Sanders candidacy. It is a daunting map, and it is one of the reasons why Martin O’Malley would probably pick up support should a tragedy befall Ms. Clinton. But it is not as daunting a map as the one in the previous post. 

And it is even less daunting than it seems if Walker is the GOP candidate. A Walker candidacy would energize black voters. (How do I know this? Well, it is not very scientific; I know a lot of black voters. Walker skeeves and angers them; Jeb! and Marco do not.) Sanders may have some trouble with black voters right now in the primary ... but that would go away against Walker in the general.

So if Sanders can match Obama’s numbers among nonwhites, then Scott Walker wins the national vote by only 52%-48%, even if he pulls in a Reaganesque landslide among white people, a full seven-point swing for the GOP.

Starting off from a four-point deficit instead of a eight-point deficit, Sanders looks even better. Combining exit poll data from here with demographic data from here lets you then compute the following Walker margins for various swing states on the assumption that Walker gets a seven-point swing from 2012, but only among white people:

	GOP	EVs	Sanders EVs
Nevada	48.2%	6	192
Colorado	51.0%	9	201
Florida	51.0%	29	230
Virginia	51.4%	13	243
Pennsylvania	54.2%	20
North Carolina	54.7%	15
Ohio	54.9%	18
Michigan		16
Minnesota		10

The GOP column gives Walker’s starting margin against Sanders. The EV column gives the state’s electoral votes. The Sanders EVs column adds those electoral votes to Sanders’ starting point of 186 if he wins the states, which are ranked from easiest to hardest. If Sanders can replicate Obama’s numbers among nonwhites, then he gets Nevada and comes within spitting distance in Colorado, Florida, and Virginia. 

If he swings CO, FL and VA, then he is two big industrial states away from victory. In that world, it is hard to imagine him losing Minnesota. That puts him one state away. 

And this assumes that white people swing hard right with Bernie on the ballot! Is that likely?

Probably not. Look at this CNN national poll. It does not look like that Walker will get a seven-point uniform swing among white people, let alone recreate Dubya’s performance among Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans. It is true that state polls show Walker overperforming against Sanders in Colorado and Virginia relative to this analysis, but those polls were taken when Sanders’ name recognition among normal Americans was close to zero. The CNN poll implies that Sanders has since made up that ground.

Bernie Sanders would probably lose to Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, because those two candidates have a good shot at improving on Mitt Romney’s numbers among Latinos. But Sanders would give them a real run. They would need to work hard to win.

And Bernie could beat Scott Walker. Hell, I would bet on Bernie against Walker!

The path is not trying to recreate Kerry-Edwards. Rather it is an end-run: smash through the states where demography favors the Democrats by demonizing Walker as a closet racist (Walker does himself no favors here) while holding Minnesota and Michigan. That would put him one small state away from becoming the 45th president of the United States. 

One small state. Iowa. New Hampshire. Even Wisconsin, where Walker is not the most popular at home. 

And if he gets Pennsylvania, he wins.

This post, unlike the previous one, has no “counterfactual history” tag. This could happen. Bernie Sanders is no George McGovern. He isn’t even a Walter Mondale.

Sanders is a serious candidate for the 2016 general.

Should you so desire, vote for him in the primary with confidence.

Two Wednesday links

 Department of accents: Cockney is leaving London, replaced by something horribly called “London Multicultural English.” I don’t mean that it sounds horrible: not at all. I mean that the name is horrible. The transition strikes me as much the same as the way that the very misnamed New York Latino English is replacing the old-style New York accent. Misnamed, of course, because the accent is not spoken only by Latinos (in fact, in my experience, New Yorkers of Latin descent are more likely to preserve the old-fashioned accent) but has clear links with the old accent. For good examples of the new New York accent go to this BBC link and scroll down to the second video, labeled “Eyewitness accounts of NY crash.” Or listen to this.

Department of Donald. If you do a third-party run, sir, do it right. Fund people for Senate and Congress. Go on, do it. “You’re a man of vision, Mr. Trump, so I know you won’t be content to preside over a government controlled by your opponents. You’re also a man with vast monetary resources at your command, so I know that you can recruit and fund 469 congressional candidates while running an independent presidential campaign. You probably won’t win them all — you may not win any of them — but you ought to be able to draw enough votes away from the Republican candidates to cost most of them their seats, and that’s what you really want, isn’t it? To make the GOP sorry for how unfair they have been to you. Because that’s the kind of man you are.”

How many electoral votes could Bernie Sanders win?

 So imagine something weird happens and Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination. The Republicans, meanwhile, nominate that nice boy from Miami, Marky Rubio. Marky picks Governor Johnny Kasich of Ohio to be his running mate. They unleash their inner moderates and charm America. It’s a massacre. Rubio-Kasich pulls in a fully Reaganesque landslide. They win the popular vote by 18 points, just like Reagan-Bush in ‘84. It’s a 22-point swing from Obama-Biden’s 2012 margins.

In 1984, Reagan-Bush won every state but Minnesota and the District of Columbia. In 2016, with the same popular vote margin, assuming a 22-point uniform swing, Rubio-Kasich gets a map like this:

Bernie Sanders would win fully 119 electoral votes. After all, in 2012 the Democrats won eight states by more than a 22-point margin. Even with a Ronald Reagan like popular landslide, the Democrats will keep California and New York. 

You basically can’t get an all-red map these days, the way you could back in 1984. The Republicans have lost too much ground in the northeast and west coast.

And note that this map is really a floor under a Sanders candidacy.

In reality, I do not think that he would lose with a 22-point uniform swing. I suspect that he would hold the Pacific Northwest and at least a couple of states from the old manufacturing belt: Illinois and Delaware certainly, Pennsylvania and Minnesota likely, Wisconsin possibly if there is a Walker backlash, with Iowa and Michigan and the rest of the Northeast within reach. It would be hard for Bernie Sanders to win the 2016 election. It would not be that hard for him to hold the Kerry-Edwards electoral map.

What about the other way? Something equally weird happens and Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination. Lindsey Graham refuses the veep nomination. So in an attempt to reach out to evangelicals and “teh blacks,” Trump picks Ben Carson.

It is a massacre, a fully Johnsonesque landslide for the Clinton-Castro ticket. The Democrats win by 23 points, a 19-point uniform swing over 2012. 

Well, in this world the Democrats really do manage to turn a popular landslide into an electoral landslide, just like back in ‘64. Sure, the makeup of the states are different, since Republican margins in the South are not what they once were, but Trump-Carson gets only 73 votes scattered across a bunch of very-white mostly-rural states.

Only the map to the right, unlike the one above, doesn’t seem possible. I can’t imagine Trump losing Mississippi and South Carolina. And could the Democrats take Texas, even against the Donald and with Julián Castro on the ticket?

So I ask you, my readers, especially the usual suspects. Who would be the Donald’s best pick for Veep, if not Carson? And how many states would a Trump candidacy really win? Inquiring minds want to know! 

Belated sign of Senate functionality!

 Three months ago, I fretted that the Democrats were unwilling to compromise with the GOP over a human-trafficking bill. The issue was over a provision preventing funds collected under the bill from being spent on abortions for the victims. Given that the U.S. Congress has regularly prevented federal funds from being used for abortions, I thought that this was crazy base-servicing. I also thought that if the Democrats kept this up, refusing to compromise on ideological grounds, it would mean bad things for the Republic.

In comments, I got some pushback.

1. McDevite said that the Democratic stance (as I presented it) was not as crazy as similar Republican base-servicing.
2. Logan (who is paid to know this stuff!) explained that the issue was not the prohibition of federal funds, which is a standard thing, but the fact that the prohibition would be permanent.
3. George pointed out that the funds in question were from fines imposed on criminal organizations, not tax monies.
4. Finally, co-blogger Doug Muir added that the GOP has a terrible terrible record as far as anything having to do with international development is concerned.

First my response; then what happened.

My response:

1. McDevite: true but irrelevant. I worried that this was a sign that the Democratic Party was heading in the direction of the GOP: an ideologically-driven party run by the true believers, rather than pragmatists. I do not think that the Democrats have arrived at that point.
2. Logan: I understand the logic. I do not understand why that is worth killling the bill over, considering as the prohibitions are not going anywhere. You are right that I am more sympathetic to that issue than I am to a fight over spending on abortions, but the truth is that the bill as it stood allowed the federal government to pay for abortions used to terminate pregnancies that were the result of rape.
3. George: That is interesting! Tell me more! Which federally-run (but not funded) programs are we talking about?
4. Doug: agreed, but as with McDevite’s comment I do not see the relevance.

What happened:

George seems to have gotten it right! The two parties compromised by stating that fines would only be used to provide legal services to the victims, whereas health services would come from a separate pot of tax money. The tax money would not fund abortion, but anti-abortion restrictions would not be explicitly extended to non-tax money. Implicitly, of course, the bill would prevent the non-tax money from being spent on abortion because it would prevent them from being spent on any health services. 

Which also means that McDevite got it right: this was not a sign of crazy base world. Which is not to say that I do not worry about the Democrats going the way of the Republicans: I do. But this story, at least, ended creditably.

The Democratic party enters crazy base world

 I have long publicly worried that the Democratic party would follow the Republicans into being a hard-line ideological parliamentary-style organization. Note the verb worried; in general, America’s two parties are not symmetric in that regard. But that may be changing.

The recent failure of the Senate to pass an anti-human trafficking bill appears to me to be the fault of the Democrats. Short version: Democrats freaked out because the bill prevents any money from being used to pay for the victims’ abortions except in cases of rape or incest.

Problem: limting federal funds from financing abortion except in cases of rape or incest has been standard for 39 years. Meanwhile, the concern that many human trafficking victims need abortions can be dealt with by the fact that such unwanted pregnancies are by definition a result of rape. So WTF are the Democrats trying to do?

If, say, the Occupy movement of 2011-12 (above) had dragged the Democrats to the economic left in 2012, that maybe I could have supported. But the Occupy movement decided that it didn’t need anything so sensible as a platform, and so that passed. Instead now we get a bizarre wig-out over something that has been standard since I was, well, maybe a year or two older than in this picture from Long Beach, New York:

Unless somebody can explain this to me, I am disgusted at the Democratic Party. (Logan and Luke bait here.) This seems like the canary in the coal mine warning us that our remaining sane party is at risk of sinking into the swamp of crazy that has enveloped its counterpart. And if that happens ... well.

Discussion bait forthcoming

 But a foreshadowing: I do not agree with Mr. Drum that Senator Rubio gave that bad an answer to the question of what U.S. strategy against the Islamic State should be. The Islamic State also control Syrian territory, so Baghdad’s opposition is not a deal-breaker. Moreover, it might be worth trying to persuade the Iraqis to cooperate if a suitable Sunni force can be raised. It is hard to see which countries could put up the troops, but Bangladesh certainly has a long-standing tradition of hiring out their armed services. So does Pakistan. And it is not crazy to try to persuade Jordan and Saudi Arabia, even if I doubt that it would work.

I am not saying that I agree with Senator Rubio. To be honest, I think it would be impossible to persuade Sunni nations to put up the forces. And if it were, I would worry about Phase V operations: can a combination of Arab Sunni forces and Muslim peacekeepers from South Asia establish order? Would their governments be willing to bear to cost in blood of a prolonged operation, even if the United States paid the cost in treasure? I do not think that I would try to set up such an operation, were I somehow elected president. 

But it is not crazy on its face. Even if Senator Rubio thinks the effort to raise such a force will fail, it is not unreasonable for him to suggest it. 

I agree with Steve Benen that the Senator is trying too hard to distinguish himself from the President, but Mr. Benen is being completely disingenuous. He knows exactly why the Senator has to do that. The weird Iran flub is more disconcerting, but it does not strike me as dealbreaking or a sign that Senator Rubio is clueless. Rather, it strikes me as a simple gaffe, understandable in the heat of a CPAC conference, where Iran policy is a separating issue for the gathered faithful.

Messrs Benen and Drum strike me as bringing up small potatoes in a (gulp) slightly partisan way. Go ahead, talk me into why I should disrespect the good Senator from the great state of Florida regarding his Levantine policy. Because right now I don’t.

Growing up in D.C.

 My son is sitting on the toilet reading a book about how to demolish a building. (Or at least looking at the very cool pictures of buildings being demolished.) I’m outside. Suddenly he yells, “I’m mad!”

So I walk over. “Why are you mad?”

“I’m mad at John Boehner!”

You cannot make this stuff up. What has my wife been telling him?

Later that day we were looking at the newspaper. He asks me, “Is that President Obama?” pointing at a picture of President Obama. (Think something the President has recently done. On the internet.) I say, “Yes, son, that is.”

“He’s mad at John Boehner!” he says.

Now, my son knows what John Boehner looks like. That is because we live in D.C. We ride the subway every day, and he likes to grab Politico from the newspaper machines in front of the Jenifer Street elevators at the Friendship Heights metro. He looks at the pictures and I identify the people. “Who’s that?” “That’s Marco Rubio!” “Who’s that?” “That’s a random fellow in an insurance advertisement!” Etcetera.

But I have no idea how he picked up the mad part. He’s right, of course. But how? He also mysteriously told my wife one day, “You don’t have your wallet!” with no way of knowing. ESP? Probably not. And certainly not how he knows that the President is mad at the Speaker. But it’s amusingly weird.

I guess it’s an occupational hazard of growing up in the District of Columbia. I guess it’ll only get worse from here. We’ll try to protect his sister. 

Our declaration of not-quite-war on the Islamic State

 Full text here. Minus stylistically-awful preamble below:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the “Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.”

SECTION 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized, subject to the limitations in subsection (c), to use the Armed Forces of the United States as the President determines to be necessary and appropriate against ISIL or associated persons or forces as defined in section 5.

(b) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS.—

(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION.—Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.

(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS.—Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

(c) LIMITATIONS.— The authority granted in subsection (a) does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces in enduring offensive ground combat operations.

SECTION 3. DURATION OF THIS AUTHORIZATION. This authorization for the use of military force shall terminate three years after the date of the enactment of this joint resolution, unless reauthorized.

SECTION 4. REPORTS. The President shall report to Congress at least once every six months on specific actions taken pursuant to this authorization.

SECTION 5. ASSOCIATED PERSONS OR FORCES DEFINED. In this joint resolution, the term ‘‘associated persons or forces’’ means individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.

SECTION 6. REPEAL OF AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 is hereby repealed. 

Regarding that preamble, when did the endless list-of-whereas style become the norm? They’re really horrible to read. The AUMF for the Spanish American War limited itself to one:

Whereas, the abhorrent conditions which have existed for more than three years in the Island of Cuba, so near our own borders, have shocked the moral sense of the people of the United States, have been a disgrace to Christian civilization, culminating, as they have, in the destruction of a United States battleship, with 266 of its officers and crew, while on a friendly visit in the harbor of Havana, and can not longer be endured, as has been set forth by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of April 11th, 1898, upon which the action of Congress was invited:

Therefore, Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

First. That the people of the Island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free and independent.

Second. That it is the duty of the United States to demand, and the Government of the United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba, and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters.

Third. That the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, directed and empowered to use the entire land and naval forces of the United States, and to call into the actual service of the United States, the militia of the several States, to such extent as may be necessary to carry these resolutions into effect.

Fourth. That the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Islands except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.

Approved, April 20, 1898.

Returning to the current proposal, what is “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is supposed to mean? Sounds to me like Congress is authorizing anything including invasion, as long as we do not stay there forever. Not that the current administration has any desire to invade, of course. But why spell out the list of grievances in agonizing length only to leave vague the limits on the action? Go ahead, Congress! Take a whole page to spell out exactly what’s okay and what’s not!

I also have to wonder why there are no geographic limits on the current resolution. For example, “Within the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic or, with the permission of their internationally-recognized governments, the territory of any States bordering on the Syrian Arab Republic.” Instead we got, well, nothing. (FWIW, the 1898 resolution was also pretty vague. We did, however, follow it up with an actual declaration of war two days after Spain declared war on us.)

Is this just kabuki?

It is a good thing to repeal the 2002 AUMF. And it is a good thing for Congress to weigh in. But this strikes me as an open-ended check.

The real new thing here is the three-year limit ... which I think is not kabuki. But I am open to arguments.

What happened in Maryland?

 Department of The Wire: the Maryland gubernatorial election. In a huge suprise, Republican Larry Hogan beat Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown by almost five points. This was a wowzer, given how blue Maryland is and how all the polls predicted a Brown victory ... although to be fair to the pollsters, there were no public polls in the final month of the campaign.

So what happened?

“Black people didn’t vote,” says my source in the Prince George’s County government. (Who says I’m not plugged in? Take that, Luke!) Further calls to my people in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Bowie revealed two further explanations: the rain tax and Anthony Brown’s apparent failure to campaign. There are no exit polls, unfortunately, so there is no way to parse the data further.

(I have some more to say about the rain tax. Anyone interested? Bueller?)

All we know is that 46% of registered voters went to the polls in 2014, down from 73% in 2012 and (more relevantly) 53% in the 2010 gubernatorial election.* Which is consistent with the “black people didn’t vote” explanation as well as the two reasons put forth for why they did not vote. More information tomorrow after a visit to middle-class voters in Baltimore County.

But this election does mean that Thomas Carcetti will not become President.

The partisan calculus behind the national popular vote

Can the constitution be changed without changing the Constitution? Well, yes. Obviously. The Supreme Court can change an interpretation. Congress can establish procedural rules (frex, the filibuster). And states can alter the way they select electors to the Electoral College.

New York state just approved the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which commits states that sign it into law to allocating their electors to the winner of the national popular vote rather than the winner of their state election. If states sign on representing a majority of the Electoral College (e.g., 270 electoral votes) then the U.S. will fundamentally alter the way it elects presidents. Here is the current state of play:

Note that only blue states have signed on. Why is that? Well, I don’t know, but here’s my guess. A national popular vote would behoove both parties to try to mobilize voters that are currently ignored in non-swing states. Republicans would try to turn out conservatives in Wisconsin and New York; Democrats would go after liberals in Texas and Georgia.

Democrats are pretty sure that there are a lot of untapped votes in deep red states. I am not sure that Republicans believe the same about the blue states. But I do not know! Thoughts?

The Monkey Cage goes slatepitchy on political polarization

The Monkey Cage was an awesome group blog. It brought serious political science research into the mainstream. It was all good.

And then it became part of the Washington Post.

Which gets us to an odd series of posts that attempts to convince the reader that American political polarization ain’t so bad. We can start with a post entitled “Gridlock is bad. The alternative is worse,” by Morris Fiorina of Stanford. Great scholar, great work ... but the argument is strange.

First, it assumes that the political parties would behave as they currently do under a more parliamentary-like electoral system. That makes no sense. One overreach followed by electoral disaster and that would be the end of that.

Second, to make his case that the parties left unfettered would do crazy things he writes, “The 2012 Republican platform plank stated essentially: never, no exceptions. The Democratic platform plank stated the opposite: any time, for any reason.”

Hmm. The GOP platform wrote:

1. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage (page 14);
2. Prohibit the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion;
3. Criminal penalties on healthcare providers who fail to provide treatment and care to an infant who survives an abortion;
4. Ban sex-selective abortions;
5. Protect from abortion unborn children who are capable of feeling pain;
6. We urge enactment of pending legislation that would require parental consent to transport girls
   across state lines for abortions (page 34);
7. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception (page 36).

Not a platform that I would support! And I would agree that point (5) effectively bans all abortions. But I would, no? Read objectively, this is to the right of median public opinion, but it is not off the charts. Of course I believe that it’s folderol, given the enthusiastic anti-abortion and anti-contraception actions of GOP-controlled state legislatures. But it sure is a sign that the national party understands the dangers of getting too far out in front of public opinion.

And the Democrats? Even less:

1. The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay;
2. President Obama overturned the “global gag rule,” a ban on federal funds to foreign family planning organizations that provided information about, counseling on, or offered abortions;

And that’s all she wrote.

So where does Fiorina’s characterization of the party platforms come from? You got me. He is a great scholar with a great book on polarization. But this was not written as a serious post. It has a slatepitchy feel: let’s devil’s advocate against the conventional wisdom. That has a place, I have been known to do it myself ... but it belongs not on the Monkey Cage that I used to love.

A worse post is Rob Ford’s “In America, polarization is a problem. In Britain, it could be a solution.” (This is the Rob Ford of the University of Manchester, not the other guy.) I have much to say about this, but I would rather make a public call for Alex Harrowell to come over here and fisk it for us. I will say simply that even if Ford is correct (Alex, we need you!), then I am not convinced that you have a problem if the only by-products are falling voter turnout and the rise of a rather silly buy aggressively anti-racist bunch of twits.

Now, as befits that great nation, the Canadian entry into the series is sober and serious. Richard Johnson of UBC limits himself to pointing out something that non-Canadians may not have realized: Canadian parties have become more polarized, whereas Canadian voters have not. That is the Monkey Cage I used to love: rigorously confirming the conventional wisdom (as AFAIK the above is the conventional wisdom in Canada) is a worthwhile initiative, Canadian or otherwise.

Anyway, earlier posts in the series are not slatepitchy, and some in fact argue against the American and British arguments mentioned above. And I do not want anyone to take this as a criticism of Fiorina or Ford. Like I said, I have done the same thing. And many counterintuitive pitches are indeed correct. But these two are odd.

Global warming denial is alive and well, except in quiet rooms

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just issued its new energy plan, an update to its 2008 plan. The 2008 document was favorable to hydrocarbons, but it included a call for reducing the environmental impact of energy consumption and investing more in climate science, as well as a call for the U.S. to lead on climate change.

The new plan, not so much. In fact, not at all. And why not? Well, Karen Harbert, CEO of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy: “It is a different world in 2014 than it [was] in 2008: We are dealing from a hand of strength.”

At least she’s honest.

But it is strange, considering as the New York Times let the cat out of the bag: the big energy companies all assume a price on carbon emissions when assessing new projects. If the projects don’t make sense with a carbon price, then they don’t happen. In other words, they all assume a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system, or costly command-and-control regulation is coming.

But none of them want to admit that they plan for a carbon price! One colleague of mine recently completed a case on a large hydrocarbon project. The company refuses to release the case unless he removes all references to the fact that the company builds a carbon price into all its financial analyses ... even though the cat is out of the bag on the fact that all the major energy companies (and a lot of other ones) do just that.

WTF, you may ask? Well, the answer is simple. The Times is incorrect when it writes that the use of carbon pricing in boardrooms is part of “a deeper rift in the [Republican] party, as business-friendly establishment Republicans clash with the Tea Party.” It is not.

Rather, it represents the fact that the energy companies do not believe that the odds are against then in the fight against carbon emission restrictions ... but that they also believe that there is a chance that they win. Publicizing their internal use of a carbon price gives aid to their enemies who want to impose one. But ignoring the likelihood that one is coming will only hurt their shareholders. Thus, they build one in.

The similarity to the quiet rooms in which Mitt Romney believed that income inequality should be discussed is not a coincidence.

P.S. One implication that should not be drawn, however, is that a carbon price (or regulation) won’t affect CO2 production if companies are already taking it into account. There are two reasons why it will still matter. (1) The big companies aren’t the only CO2 emitters. (2) The big companies will only invest if the projects make sense with a carbon price; nonetheless, those projects will produce less if carbon prices or regulation raise the cost of their product.

Happy Thanksgiving, with a short history lesson about religion and politics in 1968

I hope you all had a very Happy Thanksgiving!

This year, my co-blogger spent the holidays shuffling between Queens Village and Sea Cliff, Long Island. Since Noel’s family in New York skews almost uniformly Democratic, the political discussions tended to be about the distant past, back in a time when many — well, some — of his relatives were still Republicans. He was told by people old enough to remember that George Romney’s religion was a giant nothingburger in the run-up to the 1968 election. This was so massively different from the environment Romney’s son encountered in 2008 and 2012 that my esteemed blog-colleague had trouble believing that it was true.

Only it is true! George Romney’s religion was an issue, but a relatively small one.

“In December 1965, the New York Times ran a three-part exposé on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the first installment of which appeared on the front page. The series argued that the Church was a corporate, top-down organization in which believers unquestioningly obeyed the leadership’s dictates in social, economic, and political matters as well as in their spiritual lives. Journalist Wallace Turner was particularly disturbed by what he regarded as the Church’s racist policy on African Americans in the priesthood. But most of all, he wanted readers to understand that George Romney was a Mormon, and because — as Turner saw it — Mormons always obeyed the leadership of their Church, if Romney were elected then the Church could effectively govern the nation.”

(The articles in question were Wallace Turner, “Mormons Gain Despite Tensions: Liberals Are Stirred by Church Curb on Negro Members; Right-Wing Activity and Polygamy Also Cause Concern,” December 27, 1965; Turner, “Mormon Stand on Negroes Poses Problem for Romney If He Decides to Run for President: Church Prejudice Would Be an Issue,” December 28, 1965; Turner, “Mormon Tithes Support Worldwide Proselyting, and Membership Keeps Growing: Financial Health of Church Strong,” December 29, 1965.)

However, these don’t seem to have done him much harm. Romney’s period as an A-list presidential candidate was pretty short —from his re-election as governor of Michigan (November 1966) to his disastrous “brainwashing” comment (August 1967). His candidacy dragged on into January ‘68 but he was trailing in every poll by then, and he quit on the eve of New Hampshire. But during that not-quite-a-year, he got a lot of scrutiny, and the religious issue did come up.

One suspects that if he’d lasted longer and gone further, it would likely have been more of an issue. But in real life, despite some unflattering articles — in addition to the ones mentioned above, there was a snarky piece in the New Republic entitled “Holy George” — it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm.

J.B. Haws’ book, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception, has a whole chapter on this. Haws argues that the 1960s were sort of a local maximum in terms of perception of Mormons. After World War 2, their social conservatism and enthusiastic patriotism went far to mainstream them in the public eye. It was only in the 1970s that Mormons got demonized by liberals for retrogressive racial views while more and more conservative evangelicals came to view them as heretical pseudo-Christians.

An additional issue is that in 1968, a lot fewer Americans were clear on what Mormons were. There were relatively fewer of them 50 years ago, and they hadn’t produced a lot of national figures yet. Also, they weren’t associated politically with the GOP to anything like the extent they are today. (There are prominent Mormon Democrats, but for some reason the public tends to overlook their religious affiliation.) So, less negative stereotypes both socially and politically, I’d say.

TLDR: Noel’s relatives are right. It was a thing, but for various reasons it wasn’t a very big thing.

About that website ...

American presidents are fairly weak as these things go. Really, he can do three things without Congress. First, use the military outside the United States. Second, issue executive orders ... as long as said orders do not include unilaterally sequestering funds or overturning existing regulations. (The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 greatly limited presidential power in this regard.) Third, administer the executive branch.

And in this respect, the Obama administration has fallen down on the job. The damn website is an own-goal. More so since Obamacare is working fine in states that did the job themselves.

The wrong lesson to take away from this is that state governments do things better than the feds. There is no evidence for that, beyond vague small-is-beautiful prejudices.

The right lesson is that President Obama right messed this up for no particularly good reason.

Sadly, however, it is not true that presidents with administrative experience turn out to be good managers (viz James Earl Carter) or that ones without it turn out to be bad ones (hey hey LBJ). So there seems to not be an easy metric to judge how well somebody will do as an administrator before they actually need to administrate. Worse yet, overseeing the creation new stuff is a very different thing from managing an existing operation.

But ex post, even though Obamacare going to work out in the medium run (my apologies, Republicans, but liberalism is not over and a defective website gets nobody killed) the unnecessary mess seems to me to have shown the President to be deficient in one key skill for an executive: project management. The historical record should reflect that.

Am I being too harsh?

Good analysis on Obama, Congress, and Syria

Juan Cole has good analysis on why President Obama chose to go to Congress before attacking Syria. Short version: it is reasonable to argue that the U.N. Charter empowered the President to go to war without Congress in Libya. (This is not a universal interpretation, but it is nonetheless a reasonable one.)

In Syria, though, there is no UNSC resolution. Worse yet, there are few other sources of international support, with NATO declining to get involved and the U.K. Parliament voting no. (The Arab League has now given wishy-washy and vague support to a strike.) Finally came the news that U.S. signals intelligence suggested that the sarin attacks might have been “the action of a local colonel who either went rogue or made an error in mixing too much sarin into crowd control gases.”

So by Friday, Obama had painted himself into a box with repeated statements that he had to attack Syria because of the gas attack. But as he looked behind him, the troops he was leading had thinned out faster than Custer’s at the Little Bighorn.

With regard to domestic politics, Obama would be pilloried on Capitol Hill if he backed down as his international support (and elements of his case) collapsed. If he went forward with a unilateral strike, he would be alone and exposed, and risk extreme reputational damage if the operation went bad. (What if a cruise missile went astray and hit a village, killing women and children? What if the missile strikes riled up radical Shiites in Iraq and U.S. facilities in that country were attacked?)

Obama made a clever political calculation. The Tea Party and the GOP in general had been demanding that he submit the Syria file to them. So he obliged them. If they say ‘no,’ as the British parliament did, then Obama is off the hook. If they say ‘yes,’ then they are full partners in any failures that result. Either way, the issue is taken off the agenda of the 2016 election and Democrats are held harmless.

Those who think a ‘no’ vote will make Obama an early lame duck do not reckon with how all the votes have been ‘no’ for some years now. Nothing will change in that regard.

In short: without international support, the strike was looking dicier, but the President did not want to hand the GOP a political cudgel to use in 2014 and 2016. You might almost think that he wants to lose the vote. Almost.

An article full of interesting facts but no real argument: drone edition

 I was looking over at Marginal Revolution, having been led there by Randy McDonald. There I found a link to a paper on drones. The paper purports to be a public choice analysis of drones. So I expected it to demonstrate that the sudden prevalence of drones was due to a change in domestic political incentives rather than military need.

The paper did not do so. On page 16, they wrote, “One key driver was increased demand for drones by the military for combat purposes.” They then went on to argue that military demand was not the only reason for the use of drones because defense firms (specifically Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, General Atomics and General Dynamics) increased their lobbying more than others (in 2002-10) and then (after 2010) decreased it less. 

This is less than convincing, given that it was a time of war and that the firms involved sell lots of different systems. (A better comparison would be a carefully-selected group of non-drone defense firms against drone firms, although that could still only be suggestive.) On page 21 they really undercut their argument by implicitly arguing that the Fiscal Authorization Act of 2007 had to be the result of lobbying, as if there were no military reasons why Congress might require the makers of new weapons system to certify that they needed to be manned.  

Finally, they end by pointed out that in 2009 a group of Congresspeople from drone-manufacturing states and districts formed the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Problem is, the timing is wrong.

It is an interesting history, worth reading, but it is not served by calling itself a public choice analysis. It has no evidence for its implied causal argument; the circumstantial evidence can be explained by counter-hypotheses. I find this sort of thing odd. Am I missing something? 

Why America can’t have nice things and why I do not like most “environmentalists”

 What a week. First, I fall down a flight of external stairs (please don’t ask why) and then my computer dies. Poof, sput, goes black won’t restart. So while desperate efforts are made to recover my hard drive, I am working on a spare MacBook that we have lying around. It’s a pain, in the sense that Macs are a pain when you’re used to PCs, but it’s kind of nice to be unable to work on anything except this case on solar power that doesn’t require access to old files.

Which brings us to why America can’t have nice things. To really use renewables, you need long-distance power lines. The reason is twofold. First, the sun shines brightest and the wind blows longest and the rivers flow strongest in places far away from the people who need power. Second, the sun and wind are intermittant, so it helps to be able to use power from multiple locations.

Only America is full of bogus environmentalists who class esthetic outrages in the same place as actual environmental threats. In Chile, mostly American environmentalists managed to block the HidroAysén dam project by stalling approvals for the lines to move the power from the dams north to Santiago. One of their tactics (headed up by Douglas Tompkins, of North Face fame) was to purchase land along the route that of the power line.

The Northern Pass line would bring hydropower from Quebec to New England. Great! What’s not to like? The dams are already there. New England relies almost entirely on fossil fuels. So no problem, right?

Wrong. There are a------s out there. They want their views, or whatever. As in Chile, they have bought land in strategic areas to block the route. So on the 40 miles in New Hampshire that requires new land purchases, the developer has promised to bury eight miles of cable ... sending the cost from $200 million to $1.4 billion. And opponents’ response? “We are very happy they discovered the shovel, but if you can figure out how to bury eight miles, you can figure out how to bury 180.”

Here is a link to the Conservation Law Foundation. Click the link. Read the arguments. They do not make sense.

(Let me add that as with Cape Wind, Governor Patrick has taken the right side. I have my favored 2012 presidential candidate ready for you, although I don’t think he’ll run. The problem, for those readers unfamiliar with New England, lies in the rogue state of New Hampshire.)

I have fulminated about this pseudo-environmental NIMBY in California. It makes me angry. So hats off to my former student, Diana Rivera, who is doing right by America and trying to get the Grain Belt Express Green Line built in the midwest. Good luck and Godspeed to them!

Meanwhile, is there any way to end this NIMBYism without going back to the bad old days of wild freeway building? Which, to be honest, I am becoming increasingly willing to accept ...

Finally, the world notices that no Senate is good Senate

This blog has panned the the Canadian senate, along with the Argentine, Brazilian, and Philippine ones. And we have not spared the American one, either! We blasted the American senate not only because of it has godawful stupid internal rules but because it is fundamentally undemocratic. In fact, we went so far as to calculate what the U.S. Senate would look like if you retained the 100-person membership but allocated Senators the way we did Representatives. Short result: California gets 10 senators. New York and Texas get six. Florida gets five. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois get four, and you can click the link for the rest.

Given that, it is nice to see the New York Times finally catching up! Read the article. The Senate is fundamentally undemocratic and perverts our politics. Abolishing or reforming it is long overdue.

Unfortunately, the Senate is the one thing that the Constitution of the United States says cannot ever be reformed. It’s right there in Article 5: “[Amendments become part of the Constitution after ratification by ¾ths of the state legislatures or special state conventions] provided ... that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

Oh well.

Some unsolicited political advice

“Dog whistle” is a useful political metaphor, but it is still just a metaphor. A human being cannot teach him or herself to hear a high-pitched noise. On the other hand, people can learn to hear political dog whistles that are not aimed at them.

Which means that a point likely comes in the life of every political movement when dog whistles lose their ability to send secret messages. At that point, the savvy pol will denounce the dog whistle, while finding another means to nod-and-wink at said constituency.

I would therefore submit that inviting Ted Nugent to the SOTU is not a useful dog whistle. The implication is that Republican politicians would stand to gain from denouncing it while giving off other Second Amendment-related signals.

That is all.