The definitive case for ending the filibuster

[stevenkesslar]

Believe it or not, I'm not the most verbose guy around.  I'm citing two articles that are both very long, and very well written.

The first is Ezra Klein on why it makes sense to get rid of the filibuster.

The definitive case for ending the filibuster

Every argument for the filibuster, considered and debunked.

By Ezra Klein

I can make the argument in one sentence.  Getting rid of the filibuster is the only way President Biden can succeed.  Period.

That's assuming he has a Senate Democratic majority, which is looking more likely  by the day.  But he won't have 60 votes.  If McConnell has the opportunity to replay 2010 to 2016, he's already said he will.  His obstructionism is likely part of what cost Hillary the election in 2016, I think.  It kept Obama from being able to get important things done in his second term.  Had he been able to enact laws on immigration reform, climate change, etc., it would have helped Hillary make the case for a "third term", according to Lichtman's keys.  I agree.

I think Americans know this.  They are seeing McConnell right now prioritize getting a right-wing SCOTUS majority over a pandemic relief bill.  So Republicans lost the Presidential election by millions of votes.  And their Senate majority rests on the idea that fewer than 1 million people in Wyoming can overrule 40 million people in California.  Democrats have to become increasingly clear that the only reason for Mitch McConnell to have power is to block what most Americans want.  And do things most Americans don't want - like fill that court vacancy as quickly as they can, before they lose power.  That's not democracy.

This second article is a long profile piece on Elissa Slotkin, one of the moderate Democrats who won a House seat in a Trump district in Michigan in 2018.  It looks like she's likely to be re-elected in 2020.

I think it's a good companion piece to Klein's article.  Slotkin is a good example of what happens when you are obsessed with listening to moderate and relatively affluent Republicans - especially the female type.  This article perhaps speaks to what you worry about when Democrats are being too kind to suburban women, @tassojunior.   To me, it's a story about what Democrats have to do if they are going to be smart about getting power and keeping it.   It is baked into the cake that if Democrats don't have Elissa Slotkin, we don't have a majority.  And if Slotkin ignores liberal to moderate Republican members of her district, she's history.

Has Elissa Slotkin Detected Early Hints of a Biden Blowout?

I liked the political system I experienced in the 80's and 90's when I was lobbying as a consumer activist in the US Congress and Oregon Legislature.  It was built on the idea of having to get both parties to go along, somehow, in order to get things done.  I could actually see it start to evaporate in the 90's in Oregon.  Liberal suburban Republican state legislators were taken out in primaries by right wingers.  Conservative Democrats from Eastern Oregon were replaced by Republicans.  Everything became more polarized.

I think Rahm Emanuel is right.  Democrats need to be very good at building metropolitan alliances between cities and suburbs.  That is at the core of why Nancy Pelosi became speaker again in 2018.  It is also what allow Democrats to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate and prevail.  Poor Doug Jones will almost certainly lose in Alabama.  And states like Montana and Iowa may mostly be off limits, because they are overwhelmingly White and not very urban.  We'll see how many White voters without college degrees return to Biden this November.  But they look increasingly likely to form the base of the Republican Party, not the Democratic one.

2020 Demographic Swingometer

That's a fun toy from the Cook Political Report that makes my point.  It shows the impact of Democrats increasing or decreasing their base among certain groups of voters.  

What it shows is that Biden would be ahead for 304 electoral votes right now, if you simply adjusted the 2016 results for demographic changes in the last four years.  Note that in 2016 President Toxic got 69 % of the White non-college vote.  The last Democrat to split the votes of Whites without college degrees was Bill Clinton, who did it in both 1992 and 1996.

Right now, according to RCP, Biden is actually leading in states with 374 electoral votes.  That's because he has won back at least some of those non-college Whites.

If you shift the percentage of White non-college voters Democrats get from 31 % in 2016 to 35 % in 2020, you just picked up North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona - all states which Biden looks like he may win.    It still doesn't get you Ohio or Iowa, where Whites without college degrees dominate.  If you increase the percentage of White college graduates Democrats get from 54 % to 59 %, you also just picked up Ohio and Texas.  That would get Biden a landslide 406 electoral votes.  I actually think something like this is a realistic best case scenario right now.

Increasing Black turnout has far less significant an impact.  If you increase Black turnout from 57 % in 2016 to 65 % in 2020, it wins you one more state:  Georgia.  Same with Hispanics.  If you increase turnout from the 45 % in 2016 to 55 % in 2020, you pick up one more state:  Arizona.

If Democrats like Slotkin do a good job of listening to the voters in the middle, who are mostly White, Democrats have a decent shot at getting rid of the filibuster without pulling the party so far to the left that they get shellacked in the 2022 midterms.  

 

 

Edited October 7, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[tassojunior]

@stevenkesslar

2 things: how tricks like the filibuster, the electoral college, runoff voting, etc get to be part of the Washington "game" and 2nd , why economics will eventually end up decisive for those rich suburbanites the Democratic centrists are selling their souls for.

First the DC game has a great story from of all places a travel blogger from DC today. A friend of Jerry Overton who had that window. The airlines are about to get yet another $25 billion "help" although financially they're solid, because of political clout. The bill will save 35,000 jobs at a cost of $714,000 per job for 6 months.....$1.5 million per year !!! The workers would probably love just a  check for 1/10 of that. Ridiculous? Not in DC. 99% of the benefit goes to the airline corporation's stockholders, which corporation is already plenty solvent, to make it richer. 

https://viewfromthewing.com/why-airline-bailouts-are-getting-priority-in-congress-over-unemployment-testing-and-covid-treatment/?utm_source=BoardingArea&utm_medium=twitter

""And Members of Congress don’t hear from the people whose money is being taken and given to the airlines. And that’s because of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, an idea that comes to us from Mancur Olsonin The Logic of Collective Action. People who benefit from a policy have an incentive to learn about it, focus their time and energy on it, and spend money to influence it and pass it. When benefits are focused on a small group, that group will act. And when costs are dispersed across hundreds of millions of people, there’s little cost to each individual, and there’s little incentive for that person to spend time and resources opposing a policy (or even paying attention to it enough to understand what’s happening).""

How on earth did we get to a place where President Trump is calling on Congress, and all Congress members seem eager, to send him a bill to hand $25 billion more to U.S. airlines (after the CARES Act appropriated $50 billion)?

 

The second issue, related, is why suburbanites won't stick with the Democratic party, if they "come over" this year at all as they did in 2018. $$ ultimately is important to suburbanites who are usually more educated and upward-mobile (and struggling to move up). Democrats do spend much more on everything and Democratic jurisdictions have much, much higher taxes. Trump penalized those high-tax areas with the $10,000 limit on deducting local taxes. That's fine and didn't penalize most suburbs in most states that have low taxes. But in an expensive high tax state like California, or a city like DC, $10K is peanuts for total local tax. Higher or unlimited federal deductions for state and local taxes subsidizes high-tax places with money coming from everyone. (The same way, there is no relief bill being passed because Pelosi insists on a "comprehensive" relief bill that also sends enormous money to bankrupt high-tax Democratic cities and localities to bail them out of going bankrupt. And that will be paid for also by federal taxes from the low-tax suburbs. 

People flee to the suburbs to avoid high-tax cities and inner suburbs and when they realize it costs them substantially more federal tax to subsidize those high-tax cities they fled, they revert to voting their pocketbooks. And in states like Florida and Texas, with no state income taxes and usually very low actual property taxes, those educated elite suburbanites aren't going to stay Democratic when they realize they're heavily subsidizing high-spend areas. Especially when many or most of those high-spend areas are corrupt and hot spots of Pay-to-Play. (An exception may be college town districts like Slotkin's where social issues are more important). 

Politics based on social issues and not economics is unsustainable. Especially as people get more educated and non-partisan. (and even Trump's seniors, who love him, are deserting him because of cuts to their Social Security and Medicare). Redistribution of wealth from the super-super rich to the rest of the population, most easily through UBI, is the surest route to a super majority.  

 

 

Edited October 8, 2020 by tassojunior

[stevenkesslar]

26 minutes ago, tassojunior said:

People flee to the suburbs to avoid high-tax cities and inner suburbs and when they realize it costs them substantially more federal tax to subsidize those high-tax cities they fled, they revert to voting their pocketbooks. And in states like Florida and Texas, with no state income taxes and usually very low actual property taxes, those educated elite suburbanites aren't going to stay Democratic when they realize they're heavily subsidizing high-spend areas. 

Which to me is a great argument for a wealth tax.  Even Republicans support the idea that Jeff Bezos can afford to pay more.

I don't dispute the idea that what I will call "upper middle class" people would prefer to pay less taxes.   Probably everybody would prefer to pay less taxes.  The history of tax revolts is long and consistent in America.  And all over the world, for that matter.   

The polling on wealth taxes was incredibly clear.  Even Republicans supported it.  If you focus grouped it you'd likely learn most people just don't see themselves as Jeff Bezos.  And they don't have a problem that after paying a wealth tax he is still richer than 100,000,000 of them will be, ever.  So they won't wake up one morning and say, "Oh my God!  Jeff Bezos' net worth went from $175 billion to $170 billion.  What have I done!  I am a socialist!  Oh my God!  I will never vote Democrat again!"

Biden's reaction when asked about a wealth tax was informative.  He just laughed dismissively.  I took it to be what happens when you survive the Reagan era and instinctively know that as soon as you use the word "tax" some supply sider will come out with the knives and start fileting you over the idea that you just want to destroy small businesses and cripple growth and jobs.  So Biden is clearly comfortable saying "tax the rich" and "tax corporations".  And if he gets a Senate majority they will likely do that. But Democrats of his age who lived through The Era Of Trickle Down are appropriately cautious about not doing things that will get them replaced with a supply sider.

It honestly amazes me that people still buy that shit.  Under Reagan, we at least had respectable levels of growth - and, of course, a higher deficit.  Under W. it was a fucking disaster.  And now under President Toxic, we have another fucking disaster.  Even before COVID there was a $1 trillion a year deficit and a manufacturing job recession.  And yet last night there was Mike Pence, mouthing the same shit about how these tax cuts to fat cats just always create the best economy ever.

My guess is in 10 or 20 years we could have wealth taxes in America, when the Millennials are in power.  They did not grow up in the Reagan era.  They grew up in an America where Jeff Bezos gets it all and they get a job at Starbucks.  They are Black or Hispanic, or they are Whites who grew up with Blacks and Hispanics, so they don't respond to the same racial dog whistles, or overt racism.

What's sort of inexplicable to me is that these labor union guys in the Iron Range or Michigan just love them a big fat slice of Trumpism.  They'll gobble up that Trumpism stuff all day.  Add a but of misogyny and racism and they may say that's not their favorite condiment on their Trump Sandwich.  But at the end of the day they'll eat their Trump sandwich anyway, because they just love them that Trump red meat. 

Why is that?  It's not clear to me what President Toxic actually delivered for them.  It is clear that they had every opportunity to vote for Bernie.  They could have voted for Bernie in Michigan.  They could have voted for Bernie in Wisconsin.  They could have voted for Bernie in Pennsylvania.  And yet they didn't.  Many of them will instead say, "Give me another Trump Sandwich.  I just love that Trump read meat."  Why is that?  There's no metric that shows that it has actually helped them, other than perhaps they feel more "hope" and "pride".  We'll see what happens in November.  But it seems like those guys - and it seems like they are mostly guys and mostly White - are now the core of the Trump Party.

This is a political no brainer.  If your point is that the upper middle class won't tolerate being taxed to death, you are right.  So you don't tax them to death.  And you get very good at responding to the Mike Pences of the world when he does what he did last night.  Confronted about tax cuts that mostly helped the very rich, he made poor Kamala sound like she just lived and breathed to raise taxes on the middle class.  She won the debate in the polls.  So I guess other than committed Republicans people just don't buy it.

And by the way, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that all people or even most people flee high tax cities or states.  A lot of liberals are perfectly okay with paying taxes.  California, which is a high tax state, surpassed the UK to become the 5th biggest economy in the world in 2018.  So it's not clear at all that living in a state run by Democrats where taxes (and gas, and electric bills) are higher than in Texas has forced everyone to abandon the state.   People may be fleeing some cities now.  But that's because of COVID, not taxes.
 

 

Edited October 8, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[tassojunior]

8 hours ago, stevenkesslar said:

 

My guess is in 10 or 20 years we could have wealth taxes in America, when the Millennials are in power.  They did not grow up in the Reagan era.  They grew up in an America where Jeff Bezos gets it all and they get a job at Starbucks.  They are Black or Hispanic, or they are Whites who grew up with Blacks and Hispanics, so they don't respond to the same racial dog whistles, or overt racism.

You haven't looked over your shoulder for a while; Millennials (the "EchoBoom") may become the largest voting bloc in America this year, surpassing Boomers fast (and finally getting out of our basements). Some of them are turning 40 in 2021.  Together with Gen X and Gen Z they will be 62% of the electorate this year. Fewer than 38% of eligible voters were born before 1964. Few of the young can stand the Democratic or Republican parties and are the first generation where "socialist" is a favorable term (and "liberalism" is a bad term) They really see through political platitudes and don't buy into identity politics, trickle down or corruption. They are much more entrepreneurial and gig-type workers than employees. Bernie was their leader. Generation Z (which is 21% Latino) becomes 10% of the voters and their hero is Andy Yang. Gen Z will have very few jobs left as out-sourcing and robots take over. Either they get a UBI check or exist on food stamps and Medicaid while the richest 100 get almost all wealth. An America where a very few people own almost everything, there's a 10% borgie set serving the rich, and 90% are poor cannot happen under democracy.But it's headed to those stats fast as the now 20% "middle class" disappears) We're already past the democratic tipping point (as Romney said about the 47%). In a way Gen Z is very conservative; cut the bull and the government programs  and just divide most of the country's wealth equally in monthly payments to each person, while leaving enough to ensure investment and entrepreneurial enterprise for inventors. 

  

The other voting bloc that will become number 1  this year is Hispanics as they surpass Blacks, with Asians (mostly Indians} soaring up in % to soon in the future overtake Blacks and probably Hispanics. (Of course the longer Hispanics and Indians live here and assimilate, the more they self-identify as "white"). With assimilation and interbreeding the idea of "race", much less Black vs. white is becoming less meaningful.  

 

But the Republican party and the Democratic party both are stuck in Baby-Boomer generation ideas and politics from the turn of the century ("liberal vs "conservative" lol...they are the same thing) which are pure nonsense to the new 62% of the electorate (just as people born before 1964 can't understand why liberal vs conservative is meaningless babel). Bernie saw fit to work within a party system, but I doubt many of his young and Hispanic followers relish the idea after this year.  

Edited October 9, 2020 by tassojunior

[tassojunior]

In other news, in that bastion of socialism Switzerland, voters in Geneva have raised the minimum wage to $25/hour. ($4100/month). 

The Swiss have democracy, they vote for this type stuff, unlike in the US. Democrats and Republicans are both scared of democracy. 

https://fee.org/articles/swiss-city-geneva-votes-for-world-record-25-hourly-minimum-wage/

Edited October 9, 2020 by tassojunior

[tassojunior]

2 hours ago, tassojunior said:

You haven't looked over your shoulder for a while; Millennials (the "EchoBoom") may become the largest voting bloc in America this year, surpassing Boomers fast (and finally getting out of our basements). Some of them are turning 40 in 2021.  Together with Gen X and Gen Z they will be 62% of the electorate this year. Fewer than 38% of eligible voters were born before 1964. Few of the young can stand the Democratic or Republican parties and are the first generation where "socialist" is a favorable term (and "liberalism" is a bad term) They really see through political platitudes and don't buy into identity politics, trickle down or corruption. They are much more entrepreneurial and gig-type workers than employees. Bernie was their leader. Generation Z (which is 21% Latino) becomes 10% of the voters and their hero is Andy Yang. Gen Z will have very few jobs left as out-sourcing and robots take over. Either they get a UBI check or exist on food stamps and Medicaid while the richest 100 get almost all wealth. An America where a very few people own almost everything, there's a 10% borgie set serving the rich, and 90% are poor cannot happen under democracy.But it's headed to those stats fast as the now 20% "middle class" disappears) We're already past the democratic tipping point (as Romney said about the 47%). In a way Gen Z is very conservative; cut the bull and the government programs  and just divide most of the country's wealth equally in monthly payments to each person, while leaving enough to ensure investment and entrepreneurial enterprise for inventors. 

  

The other voting bloc that will become number 1  this year is Hispanics as they surpass Blacks, with Asians (mostly Indians} soaring up in % to soon in the future overtake Blacks and probably Hispanics. (Of course the longer Hispanics and Indians live here and assimilate, the more they self-identify as "white"). With assimilation and interbreeding the idea of "race", much less Black vs. white is becoming less meaningful.  

 

But the Republican party and the Democratic party both are stuck in Baby-Boomer generation ideas and politics from the turn of the century ("liberal vs "conservative" lol...they are the same thing) which are pure nonsense to the new 62% of the electorate (just as people born before 1964 can't understand why liberal vs conservative is meaningless babel). Bernie saw fit to work within a party system, but I doubt many of his young and Hispanic followers relish the idea after this year.  

sorry, no edit after an hour. That link is https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate/