By: Abbey Lovell,
on 3/10/2015
Speaker of the House John Boehner is learning the enduring truth of Lyndon Johnson’s famous distinction between a cactus and a caucus. In a caucus, said LBJ, all the pricks are on the inside. Presumably Speaker Boehner seldom thinks about his Republican predecessors as leaders of the House.
The post Thomas B. Reed: the wittiest Speaker of all appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Elvin Lim,
on 4/12/2011
The strategic gamesmanship leading up to the budget compromise that was reached late last week suggests a blueprint for the budget battles to come. But while many observers believe that Washington is bracing for even more epic battles to come, when Congress considers the budget for the rest of the fiscal year and legislation to raise the debt ceiling, my guess is that there will be more sabre-rattling than a serious effort to avoid raising the debt ceiling. Here are three reasons why.
First, even Democrats agree that cuts are necessary, and even Republicans know that deep cuts are difficult. There will be collusion to fight, but not necessarily to disagree. Certainly, Republicans and Tea Partiers still enjoying the honeymoon from last November’s elections have successfuly set the frame of “spending cuts” such that Democrats have been forced to fight the battle on Republican turf. But everyone already accepts that the federal government has to rein in its spending. Now, Republicans will have to take their pick between fiscal restraint and their social agenda. So far they have been consistent in prioritizing the former, for when push came to shove, even Senator Tom Coburn dropped his insistence on the Planned Parenthood rider. For Democrats, the question is not whether they can beat Republicans at their own game and propose a bigger budget slash than Republicans want, but whether they can reset the political agenda, postpone the issue, or talk about something else. Both sides however, will be sure to start off each new debate with maximal bluster and deliberately over-reach, so as to win the maximal concession from the other side and to achieve a final resting point closest to one’s original pre-bluster preference.
Second, last week revealed that neither side wants to risk the political fallout of a government shut-down. Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton was the net political winner when Republicans forced a government shutdown in 1995 and 1996. Last week, even Tea Partiers revealed their interest in seeing government work, not shut down. The budget talks were the first real test of the Tea Party in government, the first test of Speaker Boehner’s ability to unite a diverse group of freshmen and veteran Republican congressmen, and the first test of President Obama’s ability to reconcile Democrats and Republicans after his announcement to seek a second presidential term. Because nobody wants to risk appearing obstructionist, the irony of divided party control in Washington – which was the case the last time a president managed to balance the budget – is that it may well prove to be more constructive than gridlocked in the short-term. The long run, of course, is a different matter. Nobody in Washington thinks about that.
Third, while Democrats are hailing the $38 billion cut in spending they acceded to as the biggest real spending cut in history, the fact is this amount represents 12 percent of the amount (about $300 billion) we would have to cut from the budget so that Congress would not have to raise the public debt ceiling of $14.294 trillion, which The Treasury Department expects we will hit in about a month. Not even Congressman Paul Ryan or Senator Marco Rubio have proposed plans aggressive enough to save us $300 billion in one month. When politicians make the most noise, then we know that they are interested more in the semblance of trying than confident in the possibility of a solution.
If the last ten years, in which we have raised the debt ceiling ten times, is any guide, it is very likely that we are going to have to raise the debt ceiling, if not the US government would not be able to raise money to fund its operati
By: Elvin Lim,
on 1/11/2011
The new House rules require that bills be posted online for 72 hours before they come to the floor for a vote.
If this is a nod to the Tea Party movement, either the nodders are naive or the Tea Party movement has no clue what the Constitution really means.
One needs quite a lot more than a public reading of the US Constitution to unpack its meaning. For to understand the Constitution is not only know what it says, but how it works.
The more the House succeeds as a check against itself, the less it would be able to be a part the original checks and balances the Framers invented. The checks they envisioned were mostly inter-branch, not intra-branch.
Consider the various rules the House has now adopted to constrain its own powers. The Supreme Court doesn’t do this. The President certainly does not. Whereas the House has mandated its members to post bills online for 72 hours before they are brought to the floor of the vote, presidents in the 20th century have been happy to conceal their actions behind the protective veil of “executive privilege.” Whereas all bills and resolutions sent to the House now have to be accompanied by a statement of constitutional propriety, we are not likely to see a president voluntarily tie his/her hand like that. If anything, presidents purport to have independent authority to interpret the Constitution as they so please. Congress has now ceded its prerogative to do so.
The Tea Partiers do not appear to understand that power is a zero-sum game between the executive and legislative branches, and this is particularly ironic given that not a few of them are routing for the current president’s political demise.
A weak legislative branch may beget a weak American state, and the latter, to be sure, is ultimately what the Tea Partiers want. But there is more than one branch able to the task of expanding the state. Tea Partiers might have missed the fact that whereas Republican legislators helped to expand the scope and size of the federal government during the Civil War and Reconstruction, in the 20th century, presidents have been the motive force behind the expansion of the American state. Think of Theodore Roosevelt and the civil service, Franklin Roosevelt and Social Security, Lyndon Johnson and Medicare. Crippling the legislature only makes it more susceptible to the executive whim. Betimes the executive exercises impulse control, but most of the time, presidents grow the state. Whether it pertains to the social security state or the military industrial complex, it’s still the federal budget that has been exploding, and the emboldened executive of our times has quite a lot to do with it.
There are real consequences for our republic whenever someone one or one movement purports that someone else does not have the privilege of interpreting our Constitution. Quite often, they are simply ceding the interpretative power to someone else – either the President or less often, the Courts. Worse still is when the would-be constitutional purist reserves interpretation only for himself by purporting that the Constitution only needs to be read for its meaning to be manifest.
No, I am not talking about John Boehner, but Jared Loughner, the man taken into custody for the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who wrote on a Youtube video [3:15] the following:
“The majority of citizens in the United States of America have never read the Constitution of the United States of America.
You don’t have to accept the federalist laws.
Nonetheless, read the United States’ of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.
By: Elvin Lim,
on 11/9/2010
The Constitution understands that what you and I believed in 2008 and what we believe in 2010 could be the same or it could be different – but what matters is that the Constitution predicted our fickleness and finds its average between the two. The change that Obama promised in 2008 was as much mandated as the change that the Republicans and the Tea Partiers resisted in 2010. This is an important lesson for both Republicans in Congress and the President. If mandates are fragile, even meaningless things, then at the very least, neither should make too much of their own.
But still, since we are committed to majoritarian rule, it would be worthwhile to try to divine exactly what the American people are looking for in the next two years. Just where is the median position between the electoral mandate of 2008 and 2010? Should Barack Obama try to do what Bill Clinton did, and find a “third way” compromise with Republicans, and John Boehner should try to, like Newt Gingerich, push a purist Republican agenda? On balance, I think Obama should resist the urge to over-react, and Boehner should resist the urge to over-reach.
Bill Clinton’s mandate from 1992 was not only much smaller (with 45 million Americans voting for him, he received a plurality but not a majority of the popular vote), it was also a mandate (“Putting People First”) that wasn’t based on a campaign that was categorically and emphatically about change. When his party lost 54 seats in the House in 1994, it was certainly humbling compared to the relatively paltry size of his own mandate.
Less so for Barack Obama. About 90 million voters turned out last week. Assuming that a vote for a Republican candidate for the House and the Senate and in any state can be meaningfully clumped together to articulate a generic Republican mandate for 2010, then about 47 million voters (52 percent of 90 million) signed on to the Republican Pledge for America in 2010.
That leaves an undiluted and quite unambiguous vote for one man, Barack Obama, in 2008 that was one and a half times the number of votes cast for 286 Republican women and men (239 in the House plus 47 in the Senate) in 2010, since 132 million Americans turned out in the 2008 elections, and about 70 million chose Barack Obama and his version of change. That’s a pretty hefty differential, and if so 2011 should not be replayed as if it were 1995.
If Obama should not over-react, neither should Republicans over-reach. Republicans should not be blamed for playing the hype game today. It sets the bargaining position in their favor when they take control of Congress in January. But, Republicans should be careful with too much of a good thing. The higher the expectations they set, the harder they can fall. (Obama found that out.)
Obama and the new Congress should understand that the system under which they operate was designed to facilitate a conversation between voting generations. And since the system, in effect, anticipated the fickleness of voters, it is incumbent on those we have selected to represent us in government to enact a careful titration of two mandates loudly articulated against
By: Elvin Lim,
on 9/28/2010
The Republican “Pledge to America” is an attempt to show that the Republicans are more than a Party of No. The Pledge to America, however, is just a clever way to disguise a set of promises to undo or not do; but it is not ultimately a pledge to do anything.
Party platforms make a little more sense in the British parliamentary system, from whence they developed, because parliamentary sovereignty there does not have to contend with the separation of powers. But the Republican’s watered-down platform is a stunt if only for one reason alone. It’s called the presidential veto, and the Pledge exaggerates what Republican takeovers in one or both chambers of Congress in November could achieve. This is a Pledge of faux intentions because Republicans know full well that it would only take a stroke of a presidential pen and almost every one of the proposals contained in the Pledge will not see the legislative light of day. If Democrats think they had it tough in the last two years trying to get 60 senators on board with each of their proposed bills, wait till the Republicans try getting 67.
The Pledge, then, is not even governing by campaigning, because it is pretend-governing by campaigning. How the Republicans are going to deliver, for example, on their promise that they will allow any lawmaker (Democratic or Republican) to introduce an amendment that would cut spending on any spending bill boggles the mind. What if the likes of Dennis Kucinich introduces amendments to reduce defense spending in every bill and the Congress grinds to a procedural halt? And if that’s the intention (as John Boehner flirts with the idea of shutting down the government), there is a problem there too.
At root, there is something fundamentally inconsistent about the Pledge. A philosophy of Government against Government is rather more self-defeating than the far Right admits. Not many people and certainly not many independents want to send representatives and Senators to Washington to sit there and do nothing or merely to undo something (like Obamacare). And Tea Partiers should realize that no politician is going to endure the campaign trail and finally get to DC only to make his/her job and reason for existing perfunctory. There is a built-in bias for government in the very notion of elections, and the far Right’s desire to starve the beast called the federal government cannot be accomplished for as long as the American people support Medicare and Social Security (neither of which are given much attention in the Pledge.) The beast is here to stay, so we might as well learn to tame it.
The GOP plans to unveil this Pledge at a hardware store in suburban Virginia on Thursday. The ceremony and hoopla may look patriotic, and heart-felt, and in keeping with our highest founding ideals. But the Pledge to America is little more than a publicity stunt revealing the danger of pretend-governing via campaigning in America. The solution to our troubles is not no government, but better government, and this nuance appears to be lost on the poll-tested slogans of this election year.
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at
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