October 11, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:How well will divided government work?
Many libertarians who, like me, are planning to vote Democratic this mid-term are rubbing their hands at the prospect of divided government. Personally, I'm not counting on it. Those libertarians are looking at the good results of divided government during the Clinton years; but R/D ≠ D/R. Congress is the one that appropriates the money, not the president; if congress is against him, all the president can do is veto. And Bush isnt much of a veto-er
Are Republicans such bad spenders that it doesn't even matter whether the Dems get in? Colour me sceptical. The Democrats have opposed most of the major Republican (non-defense) initiatives on the grounds that they didn't spend enough money. They're also raring to go after high-profile private firms like Wal-Mart. I'm voting Democrat out of disgust, not hope. Of course, I get to do things like that, because I live in a state that would go Democratic if it was Jesus Christ (R) against Josef Stalin (D). Your mileage may vary. I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up.
Posted by Jane Galt at October 11, 2006 1:15 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>A slight Democrat majority in either house of congress will probably result in significantly more spending so they can get a few Republicans on board. More defense for Rs, more social programs for Ds. Everyone is happy, except the people footing the bill.
They'll have all sorts of hearings about Walmart, private equity firms, big oil, the gun industry, and so on and so forth. Hopefully no new legislation that restricts these things will be enacted, but you never know!
Posted by: GMR on October 11, 2006 2:35 PMYesterday: Dems saying they'll move to Canada if Bush wins.
Today: Repubs saying they'll vote Dem in protest of his poor performance*.
When it comes time to pull the lever, I know which way most of the "outrage" is going to break.
*(which wasn't that bad and I don't really totally disagree with his choices and it's not really torture and it's only 2% of GDP and it's just a blog, ya know?)
Posted by: Mike on October 11, 2006 3:31 PMA slight Democrat majority in either house of congress will probably result in significantly more spending so they can get a few Republicans on board. More defense for Rs, more social programs for Ds. Everyone is happy, except the people footing the bill.
I think you’re right, particularly if Democrats take the House which has usually been better than the Senate on spending issues. Moreover there’s a little matter of the fact that the real fiscal concern is with entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – which are all on autopilot. “Gridlock” won’t fix those nor stop them from growing but it will put us at least another two years closer to the retirement of the baby boom generation without enacting a solution.
I think "sceptical" is The Economist's 3rd favor-- favourite word, after "the" and "a". And every time I read that, I read it as "septical".
Posted by: pskbae on October 11, 2006 4:44 PM"Colour me sceptical"
JG, too bad you don't have "idiogram-check" dialed to "American English", or is that your latent Tory-ism showing again? :^)
Posted by: Mark E Hoffer on October 11, 2006 5:21 PM"...I live in a state that would go Democratic if it was Jesus Christ (R) against Josef Stalin (D)."
I have neither the link nor the time to track it down, but I read that a presidential preference poll in NY state showed Giuliani defeating Hillary Clinton.
Back in June when various sports columnists were writing about the 20th anniversary of Len Bias' death-by-cocaine, Radley Balko posted about the massive and tyrannical drug war expansion that followed, using a lengthy and eye-popping excerpt from a book by Dan Baum.
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026710.php#026710
The paragraph that stuck out at me at the time was this:
---
Immediately upon returning from the July 4 recess, Tip O'Neill called an emergency meeting of the crime-related committee chairmen. Write me some goddamn legislation, he thundered. All anybody up in Boston was talking about was Len Bias. The papers were screaming for blood. We need to get out front on this now. This week. Today. The Republicans beat us to it in 1984 and I don't want that to happen again. I want dramatic new initiatives for dealing with crack and other drugs. If we can do this fast enough, he said to the Democratic leadership arrayed around him, we can take the issue away from the White House.
---
What struck me about this paragraph is that the priority of the men in that room was not what best to do about the actual issue at hand; it was beating the Republicans to the punch on a headline-grabbing issue.
A divided government spends a lot of time squabbling, and the more egregious - to the other party - items on each party's agenda tend to be shot down. But as soon as a "bipartisan" issue comes up where both parties are in agreement, there is a race between the parties to grasp an issue and make it theirs, and in the rush to "get something done" some very bad legislation gets passed. I don't think that totally cancels out the benefits of divided government, but in the civil liberties sphere, divided government isn't exactly the land of milk and honey.
Posted by: solarjetman on October 11, 2006 6:18 PMI'm voting Democrat out of disgust, not hope.
As a former Manhattan voter, I'd be interested to hear your thinking on strategic voting under such conditions.
My own story: I voted for Nader in 1996 in the Greenwich Village precinct because I was so ticked at Clinton for signing the "Defense of Marriage Act" on the eve of the election. I didn't really want Nader to win, of course -- I really, really don't like Nader -- but at that point Dole was something like 40 points behind Clinton and I thought it was the best way of signalling my discontent with Clinton.
In retrospect, I regret that vote, because Nader's meager but above expectation showing probably egged him on for 2000.
My rule of thumb now is no strategic voting under any circumstances; I vote for the candidate who I think will do the best job or I don't vote at all.
Jane, is your vote a "best job" vote or a signalling vote? Given your politics, I think I could see a signalling vote going both ways (vote for D to send Rs nationally a signal that you don't like what they're up to; vote for R to send Ds message not to get too comfortable).
Posted by: alkali on October 11, 2006 7:13 PMIf one is going to cast a protest vote, one should at least cast that vote to the (third) party that most closely pretends to voice ones idealogies. Yet there are caveats. Here in Colorado, things aren't as pre-ordained as they are in NYC, thus voting in protest will likely lead to electoral results worse than what you were originally protesting. Alkali's point is salient - viscerally motivated protest votes can backfire.
Posted by: bains on October 11, 2006 9:57 PMdisclaimer: long post
"By Lou Dobbs
CNN
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Editor's note: Lou Dobbs' commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com
NEW YORK (CNN) -- I don't know about you, but I can't take seriously anyone who takes either the Republican Party or Democratic Party seriously -- in part because neither party takes you and me seriously; in part because both are bought and paid for by corporate America and special interests. And neither party gives a damn about the middle class.
Our country's middle class is not just collateral damage in what has become all-out class warfare. Political, business and academic elites are waging an outright war on working men and women and their families, and there is no chance the American middle class will survive this assault if the dominant forces unleashed over the past five years continue unchecked.
They've accomplished this through large campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists that have swamped Washington, and control of political and economic think tanks and media. Lobbyists, in fact, are the arms dealers in the war on the middle class, brokering money, influence and information between their clients our elected officials.
Yet in my entire career, I've literally never heard anyone in Congress argue that lobbyists are bad for America. In 1968 there were only 63 lobbyists in Washington. Today, there are more than 34,000, and lobbyists now outnumber our elected representatives and their staffs by a 2-to-1 margin.
According to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, from 1998 through 2004, lobbyists spent nearly $12 billion to not only influence legislation, but in many cases to write the language of the laws and regulations.
Individual firms, corporations and national organizations spent a record $2.14 billion on lobbying members of Congress and 220 other federal agencies in 2004, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. That's nearly $6 million a day spent to influence our leaders. We really do have the best government money can buy.
But as I discuss in my new book, "War on the Middle Class," what if we all resolved that we would not permit either the Republicans or Democrats to waste their time and ours with wedge issues? Both parties love to excite their bases by focusing on wedge issues like gay marriage, the pledge of allegiance, school prayer, judicial appointments, gun control, stem cell research and welfare reform.
Each of these wedge issues is important in varying degrees to large numbers of us, but none of them rises to the level of urgency or the requirement of immediate change in public policy.
These issues are raised by both political parties to distract and divert public attention from the profound issues -- like educating our youth, economic inequality and the war against radical Islamic terrorists -- that affect our daily lives and the American way of life. Imagine the consternation in Washington if both parties had to contend with a national electorate whose political affiliation had dramatically changed within a matter of weeks or months.
In both Republican and Democratic administrations, Congress has passed and sustained billions of dollars in royalty payments and subsidies to big oil companies; pushed through a corporate-written, consumer-crippling bankruptcy law; embraced the death of the estate tax; approved every free trade deal brought to a vote; and supported illegal immigration for the sake of cheap labor.
The party strategists and savants are telling us that fewer Americans will turn out to the polls than ever before, disgusted by a disgraced former congressman. But we don't have to wait for the midterm elections to begin to engage in our new political life.
There's something all of us could do that would have an immediate impact and send a powerful message to both corporation-dominated political parties and to our elected officials in Washington. Our so-called representatives in both parties have been working against the interests of the middle class for so long that they take our votes for granted, or they take advantage of the fact that a sizable number of us don't vote at all.
So what if a majority of us decided once and for all to walk into our town and city halls all over the country and change our party affiliation from Republican or Democrat to independent? What if that sizable number of us who don't vote at all decided to register as independents? For the first time in decades, working middle-class Americans might just get the attention of our elected officials in Washington.
Our middle class has suffered in silence for far too long, and it cannot afford to suffer or be silent much longer. Hardworking Americans have not spoken out about their increasingly marginalized role in this society, and as a consequence they've all but lost their voice.
Without that strong, clear and vibrant voice, all the major decisions about America and our future will be made by the elites of government, big business and the dominant special interests. Those elites treasure your silence, as it enables them to claim America's future for their own.
I sincerely hope that we will find the resolve to face these challenges to our way of life, and we do so soon. George Bernard Shaw said, "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
I'm stupid enough to be absolutely sincere in the hope that middle-class America will awake soon and take action."
L. Dobbs is one of the few true lanterns left in the MSM.
Posted by: Mark E Hoffer on October 11, 2006 11:44 PMI suspect with a D congress, W will be much more fond of the veto.
Posted by: donv on October 12, 2006 12:00 AML. Dobbs is one of the few true lanterns left in the MSM.
Only if "lantern" is slang for "economic illiterate".
The middle class in America isn't suffering. It gets the lion's share of government benefits while the upper income bracket picks up the tab. Home ownership is at a record high and unemployment is quite low. So boo fuckity hoo for the poor oppressed middle class -- they've never had it so good.
But I can't say I'm surprised that a person as clueless as Dobbs -- whose rants against outsourcing get the MST3k treatment at any gathering of economists -- things that the middle class is in bad shape.
Posted by: Dan on October 12, 2006 5:42 AMI'm sure the Dems and Reps will be able to find programs to fund that will be mutually beneficial to both groups of congressmen.
The current republican congress doesn't seem averse to spending so long as they get a kickback.
Posted by: aaron on October 12, 2006 7:24 AMIf Bush became a vetoer, we'd quickly find enough bipartisanship to over-ride a veto.
Posted by: aaron on October 12, 2006 7:26 AMI'll be voting D and hoping a split government will slow the R assault against the Constitution. If we are very lucky it may also help turn back the tide of religious fundamentalism that now provides cover for bigots.
Posted by: Renaissance on October 12, 2006 7:57 AMJane,
Why not vote for a Libertarian?
Your protest vote is going to get lost in the flood of NY Democratic votes. Vote for the group that you agree the most with, and send an email to the Republicans telling them why they are not getting your vote this time...
'Jane,' big of me not to think Hillary is as bad as Josef, but I wish you would speak more directly, if you're not, about why you're voting for her.
In relation to communism, it was fascinating to work with a doctor who had had a position of some minor prominence is Soviet officialdom. He related that when Soviet intelligence would deal with communist idealists who were critical of Stalin they might tell the newbies that no one was happier than Mr. Stalin when the Zherinski police building was liberated from the czar and destroyed because Stalin's record's as a czarist agent were destroyed. Josef is a hard man to get your mind around. OK, most politicians are capable of some similar iconic manipulation but Hilary seems to have rather more of Josef's nihilistic center.
Posted by: michael on October 13, 2006 1:33 AMBut you KNOW that there's a choice, right?
I know, I know; the (big-L) Libertarians don't deserve to win, either. But the Lib-leaning Dems and Lib-leaning Repoblicans DO deserve to win; they just can't get nominated because both party's heirarchies are radicalized, while the majority are less-so.
But the Libertarians don't actually have to WIN elections to have a massive influence on the future of both major parties; the Libs simply need to have more votes than the DIFFERENCE between the major parties. Whenever any Demublican or Repocrat candidate looks at the vote totals and says, "If I had won half of the Libertarian voters, I'd have won!" then enough major party candidates will begin to move - however slowly - in the Libertarian direction. And I don't think it'll take much to move the country away from both - either? - the right or left precipices.
I encourage you, and your readers, to vote Libertarian as the only kind of "protest vote" that will ever mean anything.
Posted by: Ken Mitchell on October 14, 2006 7:02 PMJane, your voting plan is really ignorant and doomed to backfire. Embolden Hillary?!* WTF?!
So, you're a big government statist now?
Have you no integrity?
* The bigger her margin of victory, the more she feels the mandate from the people, this time around and steamin' on towards the Dictatorship, er, Presidency. Make it a squeaker, Jane! Make her SWEAT!
Posted by: kentuckyliz on October 14, 2006 10:33 PM