Author Archives: Nolan McCarty

My Inauguration Speech

Posted on January 21, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

Note: Yesterday I presided over Princeton’s celebration of the Inaugural. Below are my opening rermarks.

In less than one hour, Barack Hussein Obama will be inaugurated as the 44^th president of the United States. But to call this moment historic is the worst kind of understatement.

After all in 220 years under our constitution, we have held only 65 inaugurations of 42 different men. Each of these men in their own ways under different circumstances changed the destiny of our nation for both good and for ill. So any inauguration is a historical moment.

In historical terms, this inauguration does indeed transcend almost all others.

First, the ascension of Barack Obama is a powerful symbol of opportunity and racial progress, not only in the United States but throughout the world. That a member of a formerly oppressed racial minority obtained the office of chief executive in a democratic election is not just a first in our history, but in Human history. Of course, it does not mean the end of the American Dilemma, but it is one of the great milestones of progress to date.

But this inauguration is also among the most important for much more somber reasons, for Barack Obama will inherit the leadership of a government and nation that:

· Is engaged in two wars

· Requires great vigilance about terrorism and security

· Is entering what is perhaps the economic recession in decades

· Faces a near collapse of its financial system

· Has witnessed many citizens struggle to keep their homes in the face of a collapse in the real estate market

Moreover, the country faces short and long term problems in the areas:

· Social security

· Education

· Medicare

· Health costs and coverage

· Energy dependence and climate change

As pressing as these issues are, President Obama will not have the luxury of turning inward. As a world leader, he faces

· A tenuous cease fire after another war in the Middle East

· The very real threat of the expansion of the nuclear club

at a time when American prestige has ebbed.

Of course, other presidents faced grave challenges as well:

President Washington governed an infant nation under a new constitution that easily could have failed due to foreign intervention or the internal squabbling of the states.

President Lincoln took the mantle of a country on the brink of Civil War and preserved the union only by fighting and winning it.

And of course, President Franklin Roosevelt inherited the worst economy in American history and was ultimately drawn into the cauldron of world war.

Each of these presidencies offers insights and wisdom from which President Obama may draw: lessons about hard choices, lessons about sacrifice, lessons about the intertwining of principle and politics.

But the most important lessens may be the humbling ones, the lesson that problems of such magnitude do not magically disappear in a year or two, and the lesson that success is not preordained. After all, for every Lincoln, there was a Buchanan and for every Roosevelt there was a Hoover: otherwise decent and capable men who faced similar circumstances yet failed to resolve the crises the nation faced.

So given this backdrop, today is a day of historic hope. Regardless of the principals, partisanship, and ideologies that divide us as Americans, it is day in which we as Americans place our trust in a new president and pray that he may embark on a historical presidency of progress and renewal.

Brookings Report on the 110th Congress

Posted on January 19, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

Brookings has released a report written by Sarah Binder, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein and Molly Reynolds that reviews the performance of the 110th Congress and compares it to recent Republican-led congresses. To compare apples to apples, much of the report concentrates on the performance of the 110th compared to the 104th as both terms mark the ascendancy of a new partisan majority and the establishment of divided government.

The report is negative for the most part. Many of the positives of the 110th are faint praise comparisons with the era of Republican control.

The highlights after the jump.

Continue reading →

Fastest Veto in History?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

It was reported yesterday that President-elect Obama told a closed-door meeting of senators that he would veto any resolution to restrict the second TARP tranch of $350 billion. Because Congress has fifteen days from Monday to pass the resolution and the president has 10 days to veto it, any such showdown would occur no later than the president’s first two weeks in office. But because of the urgency involved, it could come as early as inauguration day.

That got me, the author of a recent paper on the history of the veto, wondering whether it would be the earliest veto in any president’s first term. As I suspected even before cracking the books, the current record holder is Gerald Ford who vetoed legislstion to “reclassify positions of deputy marshals” on day 4 of his adminstration. But, as they would say in track and field, that record is “wind-aided.” Similarly, Lyndon Johnson vetoed amendments to a tariff act on day 37. Among first term elected presidents, the mark is day 36 by U.S. Grant. This one also deserves an asterick because it was a pocket veto after one of the short March legislative sessions that were held prior to the constitutional amendment moving inauguration from March to January.

So I declare that the modern record is held by Obama’s idol FDR who vetoed amendments to the Federal Farm Loan Act after just 103 days. So Obama would absolutely smash this mark unless one side blinks (which alas I predict will be the case).

Here is how all the other presidents since 1900 stack up. The topics of some of the vetoed legislation are downright quaint.

President	Entered Office	First Veto	Day in Office	Topic
Bush II	1/20/2001	7/19/2006	2007	Restrictions on Stem Cell Funding
Clinton	1/20/1993	6/7/1993	139	FY 1995 Supplemental
Bush I	1/20/1989	7/1/1989	163	Export of technology for FS-X aircraft
Reagan	1/20/1981	11/23/1981	308	Continuing appropriation for FY 1982
Carter	1/20/1977	11/5/1977	290	Authorization for Energy Research Development Admin
Ford	8/9/1974	8/12/1974	4	Reclassify positions of deputy Marshals
Nixon	1/20/1969	1/26/1970	372	Labor/HEW Appropriations
Johnson	11/24/1963	12/30/1963	37	Amend Tariff Act of 1930
Kennedy	1/20/1961	5/26/1961	127	Relief of William Joseph Vincent
Eisenhower	1/20/1953	6/15/1953	147	Relief of Helmuth Wolf Gruhl
Truman	4/12/1945	7/17/1945	97	Amend Selective Training and Service Act
F. Roosevelt	3/4/1933	6/15/1933	104	Amend Federal Farm Loan Act
Hoover	3/4/1929	4/21/1930	414	Coin 50-cent pieces commemorating Gadsden Purchase
Coolidge	8/2/1923	5/3/1924	276	Omnibus pension bill
Harding	3/4/1921	12/20/1921	292	Codify, Amend, and Revise Laws related to Judiciary
Wilson	3/4/1913	10/22/1913	233	Reinstate Adolph Unger at West Point
Taft	3/4/1909	3/28/1910	390	Amend military record of Aaron Cornish
T. Roosevelt	9/14/1901	3/11/1902	179	Remove Desertion charge from John Glass

Senate Retirements

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

These are indeed gloomy days for the Republican Party. Just two months after a disastrous election, ten percent of their Senate contingency is calling it quits for 2010 (twenty percent of those up for reelection). Those retiring are Kit Bond (MO), Sam Brownback (KS), Mel Martinez (FL), and George Voinovich (OH). So far the only Democratic “retirement” is that of seat warmer Ted Kauffman who plans to make way for Biden fils.

What is perhaps more troubling for the party is the difficulty the party will have in retaining all but the Kansas seat. Obama won Florida and Ohio and barely lost in Missouri. But the longer term damage may be even greater. All of the retirements are members from the most moderate half of the Republican party (Brownback is indeed socially conservative, but significantly more moderate on other issues). Thus, these retirements will further erode moderate wing of the Republican party and further polarize the Senate.

Update: Chris Bowers makes the point that the four retiring senators may be more likely to support President Obama’s economic iniatives than the non-retiring senators. He bases this prediction in part on behavior of retirees on the TARP and Auto Bailout votes. I also found evidence for such an effect here and here.

I Request Permission to Revise and Extend My Remarks

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

My post yesterday on the Democratic leadership’s reform of the motion to recommit turns out to be somewhat misleading, albeit in a way consistent with my original argument. The change that the House adopted yesterday is somewhat more subtle than the one suggested by my post (my fault for not reading the proposed rules changes that were posted on the House Rules Committee website).

The actual rule change eliminated the opportunity for the minority to make a motion to recommit (MTR) a bill with amendments to committee with instructions to report promptly. The right of the minority to instruct the committee to report forthwith was retained. The difference is that the promptly instruction removes the bill from the floor for committee consideration quite possibly permanently (and therefore kills the bill) while the forthwith instruction keeps the bill on the floor where the amended proposal is then voted on for final passage immediately.

The Democratic leadership argued that this change was necessary because the promptly MTRs were killing legislation not only because of the delays caused by pulling the bill from the floor but also because committees often did not want to report the amended legislation. Moreover, they argued that many such MTRs were poorly drafted and/or were simply symbolic campaign fodder.

Nevertheless, many of my reservations about the rules change remain. If as the Democratic leadership claims that the promptly MTRs are an effective tool of the minority, the reform still circumscribes the role of Republicans and moderate Democrats in the legislative process. The distinction that the Democratic leadership made about constructive and obstructive roles in the legislative process is opaque if not inconsistent. The threat to kill a bill is about the greatest negotiating leverage a minority can have to make constructive changes to legislation. If too many bills were killed by promptly MTRs, perhaps it is because the Democratic leadership failed to recognize and accept that leverage.

I also have questions as to whether the reform will have its intended effect. First, the Democratic leaders have other tools at their disposal to mitigate the effects of MTRs to report back promptly. As Jason Roberts points out in the piece I linked to, an MTR is subject to amendment. It seems that all the Democratic leadership needed to do was propose an amendment to the MTR striking “promptly” and inserting “forthwith.” If their protests about the nature of the Republican chicanery are true, such an amendment would pass. Second, forthwith MTRs can probably kill just as many bills. If the problem with promptly MTRs is that committees will not want to report the amended bill, will not it also be the case that the leadership will want to pull many of the successful forthwith MTRs from the floor?

Ultimately, my bottom line is the same. The solution to excessive partisanship in the House is not to tolerate increased concentration of authority within the majority party leadership.

P.S. Special thanks to Keith Krehbiel for helping me navigating the parliamentary thicket.

A Not-So Post-Partisan House

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

When the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, they were criticized by many political scientists including Barbara Sinclair, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein for attempting to completely shut the Democratic minority out of the legislative process. While many Democrats (including the President) have expressed a desire to be more engaging with the minority party, Politico reports that Democratic leaders are planning to strip the minority party of an obscure, yet important prerogative: the right to offer a motion to recommit legislation to its originating committee with instructions to amend the legislation and report it immediately back to the House for final consideration.

Although it rarely gets the attention that the sexier legislative procedures like the filibuster, the hold, or Calendar Wednesday, the motion to recommit (MTR) is provides an important opportunity for the minority party to participate meaningfully in the legislative process. Essentially, when a bill is passed, any opponent may make a motion to send the bill back to committee with some suggested amendments. But because the language of the motion may require the committee “to report forthwith,” the MTR is essentially an opportunity for the minority to offer substantive amendments (but ones that may be again amended by the majority). So even if the Rule Committee doesn’t allow it to offer any formal amendments to the legislation, the minority will still have an opportunity to at least force a vote on one of its amendments, presumably one with the greatest importance and/or chance of peeling off enough moderate majority-party voters for passage. Even though few MTRs pass, the threat that they might pass or at least force some unpopular votes generates some leverage for the views of the minority party. As the Politico article points out, it was the threat of an embarrassing vote on an MTR that pressured the Democratic majority to vote to suspend the moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

It is also important to note that the MTR does not just protect the minority party, but it strengthens moderates of the majority party by giving them a credible threat to vote with the minority on the MTR if their concerns are not addressed in the bill. So the Democratic leadership’s attempt to eliminate the MTR is also an attempt to shift the balance of power in a progressive direction. Moderates should undoubtedly oppose the rule change if they think bipartisan governance has a chance to work, but, equally certainly, they will be under intense pressure from Democratic leaders to support it.

I think further efforts to foreclose minority participation are likely to be counterproductive. The House of Representatives suffered greatly as an institution due to the heavy-handedness of Republican leadership, and it would be a shame if the new boss was the same as the old boss.

P.S. I should note that there is some academic controversy as to just how much leverage the MTR gives to the minority party. Those who are interested should see this article by Keith Krehbiel and Adam Meirowitz and this one by Jason Roberts.

UPDATE: I request permission to revise and extend my remarks.

Catching Up

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Nolan McCarty

My earlier post on the continued high levels of polarization in Congress generated a few comments to which I thought I might respond.

First, both the left and right took some umbrage at how I presented the data. R Weeks protests that

Using the link to read the entire article, I find the information presented fails to support the headline used. It is apparent increased polarization is due to the continued drift right by Republican members of congress…Perhaps the headline should read “Republican Polarization?”

while Liberty responds that

I always have to smile when I hear that Republicans must moderate their positions and show “restraint” in order for everyone to get along. And if one is to believe this article, then Democrats are considered to moderates and reasonable and exhibit a non -polarizing effect in Congress. Ya, right. You only have to look at the number of Republicans representing the Northeast in the U.S. House of Representatives, ZERO, to observe an example of polarization. Good Grief!

It is generally a good sign when you offend both sides, because it means that you’ve also treated both fairly. But let me make a few additional points.

R Weeks is correct in that the preponderance of the evidence indicates that contemporary polarization is a reflection of the increasing conservatism of the Republican party. The position of the Democratic party has been relatively stable, pulled to the left only because its southern wing is now heavily African-American rather than white conservative. This is consistent with almost all of the political science research on the topic. In assessing blame for polarization, however, what we would really like to know is how the parties shifted relative to voters rather than to each other. If, for example, the electorate has moved sharply to the right over the past 30 years, the Democrats might be blamed for not going along. But comparing the conservatism of Congress with the electorate is a very methodologically-tricky thing to do, and there is much less consensus on this question. My personal view is that the electorate moved modestly to the right over the last generation (at least until the last 3-4 years) but not nearly as much as the Republican party did. So I do assign the Republicans a very large share, but not all, of the blame.
Conservatives and libertarians should not be too upset when they are blamed for polarization. After all, many on the right take great pride in transforming the Republican party into a conservative party. Of course that transformation led to polarization, and many conservatives think that is a good thing.

Second, King Politics adds the following to my analysis:

the breathless reporting by the MSM usually neglects to include how redistricting (generically) makes for less competitive general elections where the primary winner has to run to the wing of his/her party and not to the middle.

I’m going to dissent here. The MSM actually greatly exagerates the effects of redistricting. Keith, Howard, and I have the following paper under review:

Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?

Abstract

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

Here’s a copy gerrymander38.pdf.

Happy New Year

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Nolan McCarty

I apologize that I haven’t posted lately or responded to comments. But like our new president, I’m on a tropical vacation. I’ll be back in the New Year.

Polarization

Posted on December 24, 2008 by Nolan McCarty

In the aftermath of the 2006 election, the era of polarization was declared over in such astute analyses as this one:

The impetus behind such conclusions was the extraordinary success of “Red State” Democrats such as Jon Tester and Heath Shuler. But few pundits took note of the fact the these Red Democrats were only moderate or conservative on a few social issues, but quite populist on economics and trade. Even fewer considered the consequences of the extinction of “Blue State” Republicans for polarization in Congress.

But now that Congress has adjourned sine die, Keith Poole has fired up the NOMINATE machine, and we can look at what impact, in any, the 2006 elections had on the level of party polarization in the House and Senate.

This first figure is an update of the data presented in our book with Howard Rosenthal showing the average difference between Democrats and Republicans on the DW-NOMINATE conservatism scale.

Do you see the dramatic collapse of polarization in congressional term beginning in 2007? Me neither. In fact, polarization rose in the 110th Congress just as it has almost every term since 1975. The House had set a record for polarization in the 109th, but the 110th broke it. The Senate broke its own record set in 1867.

So what might the future bring? To get a prediction that is hopefully at least as accurate as Joe Klein’s, I have forecast the average conservatism of Democrats and Republicans for the next congressional term in the following way:

Assigned all returning members their DW-NOMINATE score from the preceding term.
Assigned all new members the average DW-NOMINATE score for their party and region. In other words, a new Democrat from the Midwest gets the average of all midwestern Democrats and a new Republican from the South is assigned the average of all southern Republicans.

Essentially, this procedure captures the effects of the regional distribution of partisan seat shifts. A seat shifted from Republicans to Democrats in the Northeast increases polarization whereas a Democratic pickup in the South decreases it. So here is what the House and Senate may look like next term.

In each of the figures, the red line is the average conservatism of Republicans, and the blue line is the average conservatism of the Democrats for each term since 1969. The triangles are my prediction for the next term. The Democratic average is expected to change very little, but the Republicans will be considerably more conservative. This, of course, is due to their continued hemorrhaging of seats outside the South. The net effect is again an increase in polarization.

All of this is predicated on the assumption that there will not be any major deviations from recent historical patterns. Of course, things could change. In the conclusion of our book (written in January 2005), Keith, Howard, and I speculate that a financial crisis triggered by a housing bubble might lead to a swing in the public’s partisanship and ideology that might cause the Republicans to moderate. So we have the crisis, a modest swing in public attitudes, but if the congressional votes on the bailouts are any indication, the Republicans haven’t take that last step.

Progressives in the Cabinet

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Nolan McCarty

David Lewis offers a very insightful response to my post on the composition of Obama’s cabinet. So insightful, in fact, that I want to re-post and respond here rather than the comments section.

One thing to remember here is that there arguably aren’t that many progressives with resumes to easily qualify them for a top spot after 8 years of Bush and 8 years of Clinton. I suspect where you will initially see lots of progressives, if at all, will be in the White House and in the sub-cabinet. The appointments of the science advisor and the NOAA head yesterday were both progressives. You bring them in, you credential them, and then you elevate them later.

Another thing to consider here is that most of the people who have been pre-vetted are Clinton people who tended to be more moderate.

The point about the pipeline is good one, but not entirely persuasive since Obama went heavily to the legislative and gubernatorial wells and overwhelmingly chose moderates. There are certainly progressives in the academic and think tank worlds who are sufficiently credentialed.
One of the striking things about Obama’s appointments is that each time he appointed a progressive he tended to balance him/her with a moderate. Stephen Chu gets Energy, but Ken Salazar gets Interior. Hilda Solis gets Labor, but free-trading Ron Kirk will be the U.S. Trade Representative. But moderates aren’t balanced off. Where is the Joe Stiglitz to the Larry Summers?
I agree that there may be more progessives in the sub-cabinet. Clearly, the strategy of the Bush adminstration was to get movement conservatives into sub-cabinet positions and then coordinate them from the White House. But I question whether, Obama could pursue a similar strategy. After all, such high profile picks are not likely to be so keen to have appointments dictated to them from the White House.
I also agree that climate and the environment is one area where the new adminstration appears the most willing to push to the left.

Let me just conclude by saying that I think Obama’s cabinet is one incredibly impressive group of individuals. My only doubt is whether his “Dream Team” can function in such a way that most effectively pursues his agenda.