Putting “Holds” on Hold
Recent weeks have witnessed considerable media attention on a fairly obscure Senate practice: that of Senators placing a “hold” on a nomination. Holds are essentially a method for Senators to tell the Majority Leader that if the Leader were to try to move a nomination by unanimous consent, that Senator would object on the Senate floor.
Much of the attention has unsurprisingly come from Democrats, who see the use of holds as obstructing President Obama’s ability to get in place his preferred personnel. Perhaps getting the most attention was Senator Richard Shelby’s placing a hold on 70 some nominations (full disclosure: I spent seven years working for Shelby).
What is missed in the debate over holds is whether the Senate should be moving nominations by unanimous consent in the first place. President Obama’s supporters contend that his nominees deserve an up or down vote. Yet that is exactly what is required by a hold: an up or down vote. Holds do not have to be honored by the Majority Leader (else why doesn’t someone just place a hold on health care?). In fact, nominations are privileged motions, meaning the Majority Leader can bring up a nomination for debate and vote at any time.
Moving a nomination (or even legislation) by unanimous consent all but guarantees that the nomination in question will receive zero deliberation or debate by the full Senate. Whether a particular position is subject to Senate confirmation is almost completely up to Congress. So if Congress decides that a position is important enough to demand the “advice and consent” of the Senate, then one would assume that such a position would also merit deliberation and debate by the Senate. In passing so many nominations (and legislation) by unanimous consent, the Senate fails in its responsibilities.
Congress finds itself in this bind because of its own doing. In desiring to have government intrude in some many aspects of our lives, Congress has decided that thousands of political appointees are needed to run those intrusions. But with so many appointees subject to confirmation, the Senate has no choice by to move nominations without debate for deliberation, for there is not enough time in the day to do so, especially when the Senate prefers to sending its time on grand policies, rather than the business of simply governing.
The solution is not to get rid of holds. The solution is to reduce the involvement of government in our lives, so that the Senate does not have to process thousands of nominations every year.
Health Summit: A Public Co-Option?
Still doubt that the Church of Universal Coverage is a bona fide religion? Consider:
- The American people have been solidly against the Democrats’ universal-coverage plan since July 2009.
- Roughly 60 percent of the public wants Congress to scrap that legislation and start over.
- President Obama will nevertheless use that legislation as the starting point for negotiations with Republicans at next week’s health care summit.
Mmmm, that’s good fervor.
Republican summiteers shouldn’t spend too much time discussing their own ideas — which aren’t going anywhere, and really aren’t that great anyway — lest they unwittingly aid Democrats in changing the below-illustrated narrative. They should instead focus like a laser beam on the dangers of the Democrats’ legislation, and how dangerously close it is to becoming law.
Then they can all return to the drawing board and come back with better ideas.
Evan Bayh and Congressional Comity
Today Politico Arena asks:
Is Bayh’s lament on target?
My response:
The heart of Evan Bayh’s surprising announcement yesterday that he would not be seeking another term in the Senate was captured in three short sentences:
For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the peoples’ business is not being done.
Beguilingly attractive as those sentiments may be, suggesting that some Golden Age of congressional comity has been lost, a candid look at our history shows that comity has been the exception, not the rule. And it’s occurred mainly when one party dominated Congress, as Democrats did during a fair part of the post-War period while Republicans were searching for their identity. So why not over the past year, when those conditions seemed to be in place? Is there something about today’s congressional divisiveness that distinguishes it from the past? I submit that there is, that it’s not narrow policy differences that mainly underpin what we’re seeing, but that the nation is up against a fundamental reality that much of the public is coming to see, even if many in Congress are slow to grasp it.
To barely summarize the matter, the Constitution sets forth a plan for limited government, not for government engaged in all manner of “problem-solving,” as Bayh put it – the problems of private life, mostly, from retirement security, to health care, education, job-creation, you name it. But for more than a century, Progressives have worked to overturn that design. And their something-for-nothing promises that have spurred the ever-greater socialization of life have attracted enough people to make it seem that we were, wonderfully, “all in this together,” especially since the costs of socialization were largely put off to the future. That’s the “comity” of the good life on borrowed money. But those costs cannot be put off forever. Eventually, they come due. And when they do, the differences between those who come finally to recognize reality, and those who still live the dream, are irreconcilable — because reality doesn’t “compromise.” I submit that we’re now at that point.
Not that there haven’t been voices decrying our episodic flights from reality all along — indeed, from the nation’s founding. But the post-New Deal trends, and the critique of those trends that came to wider attention through the Goldwater-Reagan revolution within the Republican Party, which the two Bush presidencies inflamed and thus sharpened, have produced a perfect congressional storm, so to speak, with irreconcilable proposals for how to get out of the mess looming before us. At bottom, in short, two different conceptions of government are at war.
Senator Bayh tells us that he looks forward to working with the president during the next 11 months ”to get our deficit under control, get the economy moving again, regulate Wall Street to avoid future financial crises, and reform education.” Yet his party’s actions, building on many of the Bush administration’s, have given us a deficit unprecedented by orders of magnitude, an economy stagnating due largely to political uncertainty, an analysis of our financial crisis that blames Wall Street while all but ignoring the role of the Fed and government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie and Freddie, and an approach to educational “reform” that denies poor children in the District of Columbia the vouchers that have enabled them to flee our appalling public schools. Compromise? How does one compromise with a proposal to expand Medicare when the program itself is moving fast toward bankruptcy?
Which brings us to the nub of the matter. It’s easy to get into socialism. Getting out is much harder, as the nations of Eastern Europe discovered, and are still seeing. It is here that compromise and comity are needed — to chart a way out. But that will never be achieved as long as there are enough in Congress who cling to the something-for-nothing myths that have brought us to this state. A comity that shields us from this reality is no answer to the divisiveness before us. If the elections of the past few months are any indication, the people are ahead of the politicians in seeing this — and that’s a good thing. If war is needed to reclaim a footing in reality, bring it on.
Kent Conrad and Fiscal Federalism
Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) has a reputation for being a “deficit hawk.” But the bar is apparently so low in Washington that merely paying lip service to “fiscal responsibility” is enough to earn you the hawk title in the press. In reality, Conrad is a tax and spender as a story in today’s Wall Street Journal demonstrates.
These examples illustrate Sen. Deficit Hawk’s commitment to deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility:
- “Like many in Congress, he is conflicted. He boasts a 23-year record of looking after North Dakota voters with ample farm subsidies, aid for drought-hit ranchers, defense spending and scores of pet projects. He has done little to help rein in Medicare and Social Security expenses—the U.S.’s biggest budget busters.”
Fed Governor Starting to Make Sense
Despite still defending the Fed’s bailouts, Fed Governor Kevin Warsh gave a speech this morning offering a few insights about reforming our financial system that seem to be lost on both Obama and Bernanke.
A few highlights:
The mortgage finance system is owed far stricter scrutiny to gather a fuller appreciation of the causes of the crisis. The government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, were given license and direction to take excessive risks.
One has to hope that both Bernanke and Obama are listening. The silence of the Obama administration on fixing Fannie and Freddie is nothing short of shocking and irresponsible. Any commitment to real reform has to include the GSEs.
Granting new powers to resolve failing firms in the discretionary hands of regulators is unlikely, in the near-term, to drive the market discipline required to avoid the recurrence of financial crises.
…Some newly-empowered and untested regulatory structure is not likely — in and of itself — to be sufficient to tackle institutions that are too-big-to-fail, particularly as memories of the crisis fade. Regulation is too important to be left to regulators alone.
I believe these two points cannot be stated more strongly: what we need is more market discipline, rather than less. Putting the entire weight of our financial system on the backs of our financial regulators is a crisis just waiting to happen. Sadly the direction of both President Obama and Congress seems to be in undermining market monitoring of firms and relying solely on regulators to “get it right” – the very same regulators who were asleep at the wheel prior to the last crisis.
Obama Small Business Lending Fund Likely A Bust
President Obama has announced his intention to use $30 billion in TARP funds to create a new small business lending fund. In all likelihood, this is $30 billion the taxpayers will never see returned.
First of all, the problem facing small business, outside of the massive uncertainty being created by Washington, is one of credit availability, not cost. For those who can get credit, its quite cheap, arguably too cheap. So if the president doesn’t intend to lower the cost of credit, the plan must be to lower the quality; using the $30 billion to cover expected credit losses. Of course, we tried throwing lots of taxpayer money at unsustainable homeownership, is there any reason to believe throwing taxpayer money at unsustainable businesses is going to work any better?
Using TARP funds for this program is also somewhat disingenuous. This program adds $30 billion to the deficit regardless of whether it’s funded by TARP or by Congressional appropriations. Taking from the TARP only allows the President to keep treating the TARP as his personal slush fund. Nowhere in the TARP legislation can you find language authorizing the use of funds to cover credit losses on new loans. Being a constitutional scholar, the President should know very well that the spending power rests with Congress, not the President. If we are to have a new small business lending program, it should be designed and funded by Congress, not bureaucrats at the Treasury Department.
Historically the two main sources of small business start-up funding have been home equity and credit cards. Clearly the availability of home equity has declined. Sadly as well, with the passing of credit card “reform” the availability of credit card lending has also declined. If the President truly wants to help small business, then the first thing to do is ask Congress to repeal the credit card bill and then just get out of the way.
Time to Lose the Trade Enforcement Fig Leaf
During his SOTU address last week, the president declared it a national goal to double our exports over the next five years. As my colleague Dan Griswold argues (a point that is echoed by others in this NYT article), such growth is probably unrealistic. But with incomes rising in China, India and throughout the developing world, and with huge amounts of savings accumulated in Asia, strong U.S. export growth in the years ahead should be a given—unless we screw it up with a provocative enforcement regime.
The president said:
If America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners play by the rules.
Ah, the enforcement canard!
One of the more persistent myths about trade is that we don’t adequately enforce our trade agreements, which has given our trade partners license to cheat. And that chronic cheating—dumping, subsidization, currency manipulation, opaque market barriers, and other underhanded practices—the argument goes, explains our trade deficit and anemic job growth.
But lack of enforcement is a myth that was concocted by congressional Democrats (Sander Levin chief among them) as a fig leaf behind which they could abide Big Labor’s wish to terminate the trade agenda. As the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress in January 2007, better enforcement—along with demands for actionable labor and environmental standards—was used to cast their opposition to trade as conditional, even vaguely appealing to moderate sensibilities. But as is evident in Congress’s enduring refusal to consider the three completed bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea (which all exceed Democratic demands with respect to labor and the environment), Democratic opposition to trade is not conditional, but systemic.
That’s Quite a Multiplier
Via Cato’s Director of Government Affairs, Brandon Arnold, comes this [$] bold claim by the National Journal’s Congress Daily (although, to be fair, they are just quoting the study):
U.S. wheat promotion programs increase sales more than programs for other grains and agricultural products, according to an analysis of wheat export programs released this week.
The study by Cornell University professor Harry Kaiser showed that for every dollar spent on wheat promotion, U.S. producers get $23 back in increased net revenue, Kaiser told U.S. Wheat Associates, which commissioned the study.
With that sort of return on “investment”, the U.S. government should devote all of its revenue to wheat promotion as an ultra-quick revenue raising measure. Right after they’ve bought the swampland in Florida that the U.S. Wheat Associates has to sell them.
Alternatively, since it is such a great deal, perhaps U.S. Wheat Associates should pick up all of the tab for the program, instead of saddling U.S. taxpayers with half the cost.
Citizen United’s Concept of the U.S. Constitution
The Citizens United decision and the talk that has followed imply two different and incompatible ideas of the Constitution.
The majority in Citizens United believe that the U.S. Constitution establishes a government of limited and defined powers. They asked: “Does the Constitution give government the power to prohibit speech by corporations (and others)?” The First Amendment indicated the government did not have that power.
The critics of the Citizens United decision assume the Constitution created a government of plenary powers with limited exceptions. They recognize that free speech for individuals is one such exception. But that exception is limited to natural people, not legal constructs. If there is no exception to the plenary power of government, the critics conclude, then there is no right to speak. Congress may prohibit speech by corporations (and others).
The Citizens United decision depends on an idea of the Constitution that forces government to justify its powers to citizens. The critics of the decision assume an idea of the Constitution that forces citizens to justify their rights to the government. Absent such justifications, the government has plenary power over speech and much else.
Which concept of the Constitution do you find most appealing?
Trouble in Massachusetts
Yesterday, Cato released a new study, “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain,” which showed that official estimates overstate the gains in health insurance coverage resulting from a 2006 Massachusetts law by at least 45 percent. The study also finds: supporters understate the law’s cost by nearly 60 percent; government programs are crowding out private insurance; self-reported health improved for some but fell for others; and young adults are responding to the law by avoiding Massachusetts.
Given that the Massachusetts health plan bears a “remarkable resemblance” to the Obama plan, the study should serve as a warning sign to members of Congress, says Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies.
The study has received coverage in Investor’s Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Detroit News, The Washington Times, the Reason Foundation and the Pioneer Institute.
The Empire Strikes Back
The Citizens United decision is barely out, and incumbent members of Congress are vowing to restore restrictions on political speech.
Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) said: “In the coming weeks, I will work with my colleagues to pass legislation restoring as many of the critical restraints on corporate control of our elections as possible.”
In the House of Representatives, Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Administration Committee – the panel responsible for campaign finance regulations – sent out an email that said: “I will be working directly with my colleagues, the Leadership and the White House to study the Court’s decision and to put together a timeline for legislative action that ensures the Court’s decision will not define the ways elections are conducted in 2010.”
It is difficult to see how Feingold, Brady and other members of Congress will be able to get around the clear and certain language of the Citizens United decision. But they will try. Nothing worries members more than free and critical speech, especially when the upcoming election already looks really bad for incumbents.
Obama’s Other Massachusetts Problem
Even if Democrat Martha Coakley wins 50 percent of the vote in the race to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (ahem) term, there are other numbers emanating from Massachusetts that present a problem for President Obama’s health plan.
On Wednesday, the Cato Institute will release “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain,” authored by Cato adjunct scholar Aaron Yelowitz and yours truly. Our study evaluates Massachusetts’ 2006 health law, which bears a “remarkable resemblance” to the president’s plan. We use the same methodology as previous work by the Urban Institute, but ours is the first study to evaluate the effects of the Massachusetts law using Current Population Survey data for 2008 (i.e., from the 2009 March supplement). Since I’m sure that supporters of the Massachusetts law and the Obama plan will dismiss anything from Cato as ideologically motivated hackery: Yelowitz’s empirical work is frequently cited by the Congressional Budget Office, and includes one article co-authored with MIT health economist (and Obama administration consultant) Jonathan Gruber, under whom Yelowitz studied.
Among our findings:
- Official estimates overstate the coverage gains under the Massachusetts law by roughly 50 percent.
- The actual coverage gains may be lower still, because uninsured Massachusetts residents appear to be concealing their lack of insurance rather than admit to breaking the law.
- Public programs crowded out private insurance among low-income children and adults.
- Self-reported health improved for some, but fell for others.
- Young adults appear to be avoiding Massachusetts as a result of the law.
- Leading estimates understate the cost of the Massachusetts law by at least one third.
When Obama campaigns for Martha Coakley, he is really campaigning for his health plan, which means he is really campaigning for the Massachusetts health plan.
He and Coakley should explain why they’re pursuing a health plan that’s not only increasingly unpopular, but also appears to have a rather high cost-benefit ratio.
(Cross-posted at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)
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