Brendan Nyhan

From my Twitter feed:
-Bob Somerby thrashes the dishonest paraphrases of Rachel Maddow
-Alan Abramowitz predicts Democrats will lose 37 seats in the House, citing the standard midterm backlash and the number of seats Democrats have to defend as the main factors
-Bernie Sanders attempts to win over climate skeptics with friendly comparison to Nazi deniers
-Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting of Obama is getting more explicit
-Credit to John McCain for this takedown of J.D. Hayworth’s birther past

Updating my previous posts on past uses of reconciliation, a New York Times article this morning by Jackie Calmes has what appears to be the most complete breakdown of the two parties’ use of reconciliation (updating Joshua Tucker’s previous estimate).

Though there’s no shortage of hypocrisy on this issue, the punchline is that most previous bills passed under reconciliation during periods in which Republicans controlled the Senate (emphasis added):

Sixteen of the 22 “reconciliation bills” that have made it through Congress were passed in the Senate when Republicans had majorities. Among them were the signature tax cuts of President George W. Bush, the 1996 overhaul of the welfare system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare Advantage insurance policies and the Cobra program allowing people who leave a job to pay to keep the health coverage their employer provided (the “R” and “A” in Cobra stand for “reconciliation act”).

For additional context, see this NPR story by Julie Rovner documenting how most recent changes to the health care system have been passed using reconciliation:

[H]ealth care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. “In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

…[O]ver the past three decades, the number of major health financing measures that were NOT passed via budget reconciliation can be counted on one hand. And one of those — the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act — was repealed the following year after a backlash by seniors who were asked to underwrite the measure themselves. So using the process to try to pass a health overhaul bill might not be easy. But it won’t be unprecedented.

And here’s a sidebar with a timeline:

For 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:

1982 — TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs

1986 — COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care

1987 — OBRA ’87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program

1989 — OBRA ’89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care

1990 — OBRA ’90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid

1993 — OBRA ’93: created federal vaccine funding for all children

1996 — Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare

1997 — BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens’ health program called CHIP

2005 — DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid

Update 2/25 9:36 PM: Politifact has slightly different numbers:

On Nov. 14, 2008, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put out a report on reconciliation bills between 1981 and 2009. There have been 22 of them, including three that were vetoed by President Bill Clinton. It’s been used for health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, start-up of the state Children’s Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform.

While some have tallied the Republican vs. Democratic report card on reconciliation based on the president in power at the time, we think it makes more sense to look at the party in power in Congress when the reconciliation procedure was initiated.

By our count, eight of the reconciliation bills were initiated by a Democratic-controlled Congress. The rest, 14, were done by a Republican-controlled Congress.

…Still, we think looking at all 22 reconciliation bills casts too wide a net. Many reconciliation bills were not even all that controversial, and enjoyed wide bipartisan support. But other ones have clearly involved policy decisions that otherwise would likely have failed. Only eight involved votes where the winning side had less than the supermajority threshold of 60 votes. One could argue those were the times when Congress got around the need for the standard 60 votes. But even among that smaller group, six of the eight came courtesy of a Republican-controlled Congress.

Via TPM, conservative apparatchik Frank Gaffney is promoting bizarre suggestions that President Obama’s missile defense policies are actually an attempt to submit the United States to Sharia law:

Now, thanks to an astute observation by Christopher Logan of the Logans Warning blog, we have another possible explanation for behavior that — in the face of rapidly growing threats posed by North Korean, Iranian, Russian, Chinese and others’ ballistic missiles — can only be described as treacherous and malfeasant: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo. (For a comparison, the previous logo is below.)

…Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.

…Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team. Readers are encouraged to offer examples of their own to [email protected].

Here are the previous and new MDA logos:

In a sane world, Gaffney and Logan would be cast out of polite society for their attempts to capitalize on the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Instead, the meme was promoted throughout the conservative press, including the Washington Times, Fox News, FoxNews.com, and the Drudge Report.

Gaffney has previously claimed that Obama’s apparent bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was “code” telling “our Muslim enemies that you are willing to submit to them” and suggested that Obama is secretly a Muslim. More generally, Gaffney’s efforts are part of a long history of smears against Obama’s loyalty and false claims about Obama’s religion. As laughable as “Logo-gate” may be, the underlying strategy is deeply disturbing.

(I’ve added Gaffney’s statement to my timeline of smears against Obama’s loyalty.)

Update 2/27 9:07 PM: Gaffney has retracted much of his post (via Media Matters):

In a post here Wednesday, under the headline “Can This Possibly Be True?,” I called attention to a “new” logo being used by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on the grounds that it bore a disconcerting resemblance to an amalgamation of the Obama campaign’s logo and the symbols of Islam, the crescent and a single star. It turns out the answer is “no,” it isn’t true that the MDA’s logo is exactly new or, apparently, that it reflects an Obama-directed redesign.

We have since learned that the logo has been used at the MDA website since at least October 2009. Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the agency continues to use its older shield-like logo for online and other purposes. The contract for a complete rebranding for MDA was let in 2007, during the Bush administration, although much of the work appears to have been done in 2008 in follow-on contracts during the presidential campaign in which the Obama logo was much in evidence.

It has also been observed that – rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA’s latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.

For these reasons, I am content to have the question posed in the last post be answered in the negative, and I regret any confusion caused by my suggesting otherwise.

Given the increasing likelihood that Congressional Democrats will try to use reconciliation to pass health care reform, it seems worthwhile to repost this table from a an April TNR article by Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein showing that “[m]any of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy”:

Budget Reconciliation Bills Signed Into Law, 1980-2008

(This post was inspired by a Brian Montopoli post at CBSNews.com linking to my original post on Mann and Ornstein’s article.)

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):

–More evidence for the social construction of the “Al Gore sighed too much” narrative after the first debate in 2000
-Time to revise my priors downward on Democrats losing control of the House — the current state of the generic ballot is gruesome:

-Ben Smith catches Rep. Darrel Issa’s casual slur of Obama as having a “foreign ideological vision”
-More misguided “Obama’s problem is his staff” hype
-Via Ben Smith, the correction of the month: “[New Yorker editor David Remnick] said the book would not be a ‘pumped up’ version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a ‘pimped out’ version of the article.”
-Jay Rosen on the insanity of the New York Times being agnostic about claims of “impending tyranny” in the US
-Mark Blumenthal’s column on myths about political independents includes a fantastic chart disaggregating Obama’s approval ratings:

Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent, commemorated the impending retirement of fellow Senate legacy admission Evan Bayh with an op-ed reviving the fantasy of a centrist third party:

So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that a third party could be a viable contender for the White House in 2012, my first thought was that he was focused on a future as an independent — and the exciting new avenues for public service it offers.

In 2001, John Zogby, the pollster, told our Republican caucus, “There is a burgeoning centrist third party waiting to be formed.” Either party could make a strategic decision to capture the center, he said, or both could wait for a third party to fill the vacuum.

Barack Obama stood in as a kind of third-party candidate in 2008, with an attractive message of hope, change and a post-partisan approach. He captured that popular, centrist energy for the Democrats.

So far, I’m sorry to say, he’s proving my assertion that Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all…

With our hopes for a post-partisan era still unmet, I say to Senator Bayh: Welcome to the club of independents who are looking for a better way to serve. Before long, we centrists may even come together to define the third party that Mr. Zogby foresaw in 2001.

It has happened before. In 1856, my former party ran a credible presidential campaign just two years after its founding. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House under that new Republican banner. If my friend Evan Bayh can walk away from the United States Senate and not look back, more power to him. But my guess is, he has a modern-day reprise of the Lincoln victory in mind.

What Chafee doesn’t understand — just like Mickey Kaus, Ron Brownstein, Unity ’08, Hotsoup.com, James Fallows, Andrew Sullivan, Sanford Levinson, Dick Morris, Bob Shrum, and many others — is that it’s virtually impossible for a third-party candidate to win the presidency. Here’s what I wrote back in 2005:

To even become a viable contender as a third-party candidate, you have to spend tens of millions of dollars to get on the ballot in most or all states, plus you need to compete in the ad wars and develop your own grassroots infrastructure from scratch. The party candidates can just plug into an established infrastructure that qualifies them for ballots, ensures them millions of loyal voters, and turns them out on Election Day. As a result, the relentless winnowing of Duverger’s Law means they are almost surely going to be one of the two top candidates. It’s certainly possible for a third-party candidate to become one of the top two, but it hasn’t happened since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (and he was an ex-president), and a third-party candidate hasn’t won since Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

And even if a third party candidate did well enough to prevent both major party candidates from winning a majority of Electoral College votes, the race would almost certainly be decided in favor of one of the two major party candidates by state delegations in the House of Representatives.

Also, the comparison to Lincoln and the Republicans is specious. The reason that there was an opening for a third party in the pre-civil war period is that slavery was a highly salient issue that cut across the axis of partisan conflict and internally divided the major parties. No comparable issue exists today.

Retiring Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh, retired Virgina Republican Tom Davis, and the center-right newsweekly The Economist (via Yglesias) have all recently cited gerrymandering of House districts as a major cause of partisanship and dysfunction in Washington. It’s DC conventional wisdom at this point.

In reality, however, the evidence for the claim is weak. As I’ve pointed out before, the Senate has polarized almost as much as the House in recent years even though state boundaries cannot be gerrymandered. In addition, the most sophisticated political science study on the issue “find[s] very little evidence for such a link.” Don’t believe the hype.

Here are some of the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
–Prison sexual abuse is one of the great scandals of our time
-Mitt Romney praises Dick Cheney’s “indefatigable defense of truth” in CPAC speech — no comment necessary
-George Will writes that Sarah Palin is “not going to be president” and won’t be the GOP nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states”
-George Packer savages the empty tactical analysis that pervades political journalism — a must-read
-TNR’s Jon Chait destroys the feckless and vapid Harold Ford
-USA Today engages in false balance, pairing pro-vaccine editorial with defense of discredited Lancet article on MMR/autism link
-Apocalypse now: Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for believing in “objective reality”

Matt Drudge is currently blaring this headline about a new CNN poll (PDF):

CNN SHOCK POLL: MAJORITY SAY OBAMA DOESN’T DESERVE 2ND TERM

Actually, the poll isn’t especially shocking. As The Hill points out, “52 percent of Americans said President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve reelection in 2012” — a number that is almost identical to the proportion who disapprove of the job he’s doing (50%).

For context, a Fox News poll in August 2001 asked the following question about George W. Bush:

Considering how President (George W.) Bush has performed so far, do you think he deserves to be reelected or would the country probably be better off with someone else as president?

The results? 36% said Bush deserved to be reelected, 42% said the country would be better off with someone else, and 22% said it depends or weren’t sure. These numbers are actually worse than Obama’s relative to the 55% approval/32% disapproval numbers the Fox poll showed for Bush.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

In a New York Times interview about his decision not to run for re-election, Evan Bayh wistfully reminisced about the bipartisanship of his father’s era in the Senate:

Mr. Bayh said he was startled at how much the Senate had changed since he arrived in 1998, and even more since his father, Birch Bayh, served in the Senate, from 1963 to 1981.

“This is colored by having observed the Senate in my father’s day,” Mr. Bayh said. “It wasn’t perfect; they had politics back then, too. But there was much more friendship across the aisles, and there was a greater willingness to put politics aside for the welfare of the country. I just don’t see that now.”

Left unmentioned was the fact that the bipartisanship of the period was largely an artifact of the South’s long history of racial apartheid and one-party rule. Good times!

(For the record, I think it’s incredibly pompous for Bayh to tout his own “willingness to put politics aside for the welfare of the country,” a Broderesque statement that falsely equates bipartisanship with on behalf of the greater good. You could just as easily argue that Bayh himself should have put his electoral concerns aside on issues like the estate tax for the welfare of the country. What he fails to acknowledge is that most people in Congress presumably believe that what they are doing is in the best interests of the country. The problem is that people disagree about how to advance those interests.)