It is a sad day when we can’t expect our elected officials to act like grownups. But I’m afraid that day has arrived. Great newsletter, Gabe. As always, keep up the great work.
Interesting piece. Many of the problems cited by playing “ constitutional hardball” is that our form of government does not operate like a parliamentary system. While there are many flaws to parliamentary government, there is much less need for “ workarounds” to the system itself. For example, the filibuster itself was created as a means to prevent civil rights legislation from passing ( a very bad motive). Over time it became a tool to prevent majority votes from even coming to the floor of the Senate, even to the point of not allowing for discussion of a bill. We already have a body that is unrepresentative of the country with two Senators for each state regardless of population. Adding and using the filibuster in this way has made it worse because each party’s motives are suspect. In the end, we have a human system where we need a significant number of people who agree to play by certain rules most of the time, whether they be codified or just strong norms. If we have players whose main objective is to totally disable the other player, as I feel the Republican Party as currently constituted wants to do, then very soon we will have no game left to play.
If you don’t like constitutional hardball, then the thing that you must avoid is asymmetric norms valorization — it just invites more asymmetric hardball. The way to stop and deter hardball is… counter-hardball.
It's not clear to me that politicians are behaving any less like grown-ups today than they have in the past. What IS different (I'm old enough to remember substantial portions of the past) is that it's all out in the open now and even being bragged about. That transparency has been developing for a long time, but started really coming into focus with Obama's pen-and-phone remark. The real issue is, when you can actually observe the process of sausage making, it's pretty disgusting.
I’m grateful Gabe is using his political wisdom to educate the masses instead of engineering a dystopian dictatorship (hopefully I’m not speaking too soon)
We have seen the WSJ not back down from Trump in their reporting but at Fox News the reporting seems as Trump friendly as ever. With Trump filing a lawsuit against their owner, do you think we will see a shift in Fox News coverage of the president?
ALOHA..... “Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought. Instead of fear, let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power.”
I don't understand the comment about finance bills requiring 60 votes in the Senate. Budget Resolutions may require 60 votes but they are non-binding and don't actually contain any funding. It is the Budget Reconciliation that actually funds the government and it doesn't require more than a 51 vote majority in the Senate. It seems to me that we are way past any sense of bi-partisanship with respect to government funding. The OBBB contained many recissions within it, clawing back money that had been authorized in prior funding bills.
What am I missing? Why is a recission bill any different from a budget reconciliation bill that effectively does the same thing?
Here in Canada, a Big Beautiful Bill, or any other confidence vote that fails in Parliament usually results in an election, so, unsurprisingly, the parties "whip" their MPs quite hard to vote the party line. In what seems like a very Maga-like move, the Official Opposition leader instructed his MPs to avoid spending any social time with members of other parties, ie lunch or dinner or coffee.
Based on my observations of the American political scene, there is a declining number of mature adults plying their trade as politicians. When a clown moves into a castle he doesn't become a king - the castle becomes a circus.
You're on to something here, and having the intellectual ability and bandwidth to piece these together is really next-level, and I applaud you for it. You are helping to provide a broader intellectual frame to help (busy but engaged) folks to place the barrage of (wacko) events and threats to our systems of government into context. The fact that we're bearing witness to such profoundly disturbing politics in every news cycle is alarming. But finding a way to contextualize this is a rare thing to find these days.
Easy mistake to make— there are only 435 Members of the House.
Exponentially more extreme is the hardball that Trump is playing with Congress. We all know that congressional budgets are now functionally meaningless. Trump will simply spend or not spend whatever money he sees fit.
Even Republican Senators were pointing out that the $9 billion rescission package was not specific—it included no list of specific foreign aid cuts. And the $9 billion package was symbolic X in the light of hundreds of billions that Trump has refused to spend on education, Veterans Affairs, State, EPA, et cetera.
Men like David Gergen are in short supply these days. A Constitutional Amendment that allowed one National Redistricting, and no more than one state redistricting, in the interval, before the next national one, could limit the damage. It would need a line grandfathering in any state constitutions that have a limit of only one per decade. Believe most states would support that.
EXCELLENT newsletter, and a subject close to my heart as an avowed unaffiliated (i.e. independent) voter who nevertheless has recently had a hard time finding anyone credible to support on one of the two sides of the aisle as that particular side goes bat-crap crazy and busts norms at an alarming pace. We need more grown-ups in big-kid pants.
It is a sad day when we can’t expect our elected officials to act like grownups. But I’m afraid that day has arrived. Great newsletter, Gabe. As always, keep up the great work.
Interesting piece. Many of the problems cited by playing “ constitutional hardball” is that our form of government does not operate like a parliamentary system. While there are many flaws to parliamentary government, there is much less need for “ workarounds” to the system itself. For example, the filibuster itself was created as a means to prevent civil rights legislation from passing ( a very bad motive). Over time it became a tool to prevent majority votes from even coming to the floor of the Senate, even to the point of not allowing for discussion of a bill. We already have a body that is unrepresentative of the country with two Senators for each state regardless of population. Adding and using the filibuster in this way has made it worse because each party’s motives are suspect. In the end, we have a human system where we need a significant number of people who agree to play by certain rules most of the time, whether they be codified or just strong norms. If we have players whose main objective is to totally disable the other player, as I feel the Republican Party as currently constituted wants to do, then very soon we will have no game left to play.
If you don’t like constitutional hardball, then the thing that you must avoid is asymmetric norms valorization — it just invites more asymmetric hardball. The way to stop and deter hardball is… counter-hardball.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-18-playing-hardball/
We have as a nation lost a consensus of right and wrong, and it is not just the Republican Party or Trump.
It's not clear to me that politicians are behaving any less like grown-ups today than they have in the past. What IS different (I'm old enough to remember substantial portions of the past) is that it's all out in the open now and even being bragged about. That transparency has been developing for a long time, but started really coming into focus with Obama's pen-and-phone remark. The real issue is, when you can actually observe the process of sausage making, it's pretty disgusting.
I’m grateful Gabe is using his political wisdom to educate the masses instead of engineering a dystopian dictatorship (hopefully I’m not speaking too soon)
We have seen the WSJ not back down from Trump in their reporting but at Fox News the reporting seems as Trump friendly as ever. With Trump filing a lawsuit against their owner, do you think we will see a shift in Fox News coverage of the president?
ALOHA..... “Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought. Instead of fear, let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power.”
I don't understand the comment about finance bills requiring 60 votes in the Senate. Budget Resolutions may require 60 votes but they are non-binding and don't actually contain any funding. It is the Budget Reconciliation that actually funds the government and it doesn't require more than a 51 vote majority in the Senate. It seems to me that we are way past any sense of bi-partisanship with respect to government funding. The OBBB contained many recissions within it, clawing back money that had been authorized in prior funding bills.
What am I missing? Why is a recission bill any different from a budget reconciliation bill that effectively does the same thing?
Here in Canada, a Big Beautiful Bill, or any other confidence vote that fails in Parliament usually results in an election, so, unsurprisingly, the parties "whip" their MPs quite hard to vote the party line. In what seems like a very Maga-like move, the Official Opposition leader instructed his MPs to avoid spending any social time with members of other parties, ie lunch or dinner or coffee.
Based on my observations of the American political scene, there is a declining number of mature adults plying their trade as politicians. When a clown moves into a castle he doesn't become a king - the castle becomes a circus.
That's not going to happen anytime soon. Thus, ping pong is inevitable.
Big story today is Obama's treason. They will never convict him but the process is the punishment.
I can't tell if you are serious about Obama committing treason or just riffing on the absurdity of it.
You're on to something here, and having the intellectual ability and bandwidth to piece these together is really next-level, and I applaud you for it. You are helping to provide a broader intellectual frame to help (busy but engaged) folks to place the barrage of (wacko) events and threats to our systems of government into context. The fact that we're bearing witness to such profoundly disturbing politics in every news cycle is alarming. But finding a way to contextualize this is a rare thing to find these days.
Easy mistake to make— there are only 435 Members of the House.
Exponentially more extreme is the hardball that Trump is playing with Congress. We all know that congressional budgets are now functionally meaningless. Trump will simply spend or not spend whatever money he sees fit.
Even Republican Senators were pointing out that the $9 billion rescission package was not specific—it included no list of specific foreign aid cuts. And the $9 billion package was symbolic X in the light of hundreds of billions that Trump has refused to spend on education, Veterans Affairs, State, EPA, et cetera.
Men like David Gergen are in short supply these days. A Constitutional Amendment that allowed one National Redistricting, and no more than one state redistricting, in the interval, before the next national one, could limit the damage. It would need a line grandfathering in any state constitutions that have a limit of only one per decade. Believe most states would support that.
EXCELLENT newsletter, and a subject close to my heart as an avowed unaffiliated (i.e. independent) voter who nevertheless has recently had a hard time finding anyone credible to support on one of the two sides of the aisle as that particular side goes bat-crap crazy and busts norms at an alarming pace. We need more grown-ups in big-kid pants.