Good Kaus: On why "the center always holds".
Reading Mickey Kaus' blog at Slate is always a frustrating experience. On the one hand, Kaus can still be relied on for the occasional steely-eyed insight into How Washington Works. Yesterday, in a postscript to a longer post on the filibuster fallout, he nailed what might in fact be the biggest problem with the filibuster deal:
P.P.S.: One question is whether the Dems can yell "extraordinary" and filibuster if Bush in the future names to the Supreme Court one of the three people (Owen, Brown, Pryor) the Dem "moderates" have just agreed not to filibuster for lower federal courts. My reading of the deal is that they can, especially if they are able to latch onto something one of the three writes between now and then. But Republicans would find it easier to yell "bad faith" for these three than for other nominees. If the Democrats have just given Janice Rogers Brown a free pass to the Supreme Court, maybe the deal isn't as favorable to them as I think it is. ...
Bush isn't likely to nominate Brown or either of the other two to the Supreme Court before the end of the 109th Congress. But as I argued Monday, under the deal, the 110th Congress is likely to be a brave new world. Owen was just confirmed to the federal appellate court 56-43; Landrieu (D-LA) and Byrd (D-VA) joined the Republicans in voting "aye", lending the sacred bipartisan impremateur. That's the real Republican victory in the filibuster deal: the Democrats, by agreeing to it, have defined extremism down, which could have long-run consequences if the Dems don't gain seats in the midterm. (Again, in Reid's and his mod squad's defence, I don't necessarily think that there was a viable alternative to accepting the deal.)
Kaus' best post in a while, though, concerns Washington's rather appalling "cult of moderation" that has led to the usual adulation for those savvy centrist deal-cutters:
Why, after all, are so many people in Washington attached to the Senate's "right to unlimited debate"? Is it because the filibuster--which effectively requires a supermajority to pass anything through the Senate-- guarantees "freedom of speech, freedom of debate and freedom to dissent in the United States Senate." (Sen. Byrd's modest version.) Or is it because the filibuster, and the exaggerated power it gives to both minorities and individuals, is the basis for much of the Senate's--indeed Washington's--corrupt cash economy? Without the filibuster, after all, senators in the minority party wouldn't be nearly as big a deal....
...The filibuster's infrastructural role has powerful multiplier effect: It means not only that obscure minority Senators attract millions in campaign contributions. while the aides of obscure minority Senators aides find pleasant $250,000 jobs as influencers with vital "access." It means that those Senators can afford to hire well-paid fundraisers to funnel those contributions, while interest groups need direct mail experts to raise the money to make their own "access" producing contributions, and all these people need restaurants like The Palm to feed them and brokers to swap their houses and mechanics to service their Acuras and Audis. Thanks to the Senate's precious right of unlimited debate, a wave of prosperity sweeps over the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area! Funded by the rest of the country.
The filibuster is to Washington what the computer chip is to Palo Alto--the technological basis of prosperity. Is it an accident, a Marxist might say, that the Washington Post approves of McCain's handiwork? Without it, many of the talented lawyers who read the Post it might have had to find more productive, less remunerative work. And the paper wouldn't have all those real estate ads.
Not to worry. As another local hero, Sen. Graham, declared yesterday: "The Senate is back in business."
The judicial filibuster is important of course and plenty of Republican senators were ready to kill it. But it's the thought, not the details that define plausibility, that counts here. The endless celebration of "moderation" in Washington really is nauseating -- this is exactly the sort of talk that has made hacks like John Breaux not only possible but powerful Washington figures. Yesterday's official reaction to the filibuster deal was especially ripe. According to yesterday's NYT, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman declared, "In a Senate that's become increasingly partisan and polarized, the bipartisan center held." The Washington Post headlined its editorial "The Center Holds" and fawned that the deal "is a demonstration, in an era of increasingly bitter partisanship, of what can still be accomplished through negotiation and the proffer of a modicum of trust across the aisle." It went on to assail the interest groups who "railed against compromise and threatened its architects; Senate leaders of both parties and the president did more to obstruct a deal than to facilitate it. The 14 senators nonetheless managed to put principle above self-protection." John McCain, the deal's chief architect apparently (and, as per usual, the hero of the day) agreed, telling the New York Times that interest groups were upset "think[ing] of all the money they are going to lose," he said, ducking into a car to head to the premiere of a film about his life...
The dirty little secret of all this self-congratulation and hosannas for "principle" among the Mods is that, for all the talk of raging extremism, in today's Washington the center always holds. The real question we, and David Broder when he comes out of his latest McCain swoon, ought to be asking is what exactly is this "center" that keeps on holding? Remember back toward the end of the 2000 campaign that basically the entire Washington press decided that Bush, who repeated his "bring people together" and "change the tone in Washington" mantras over and over was the real "bipartisan", concensus candidate (this was bogus even at the time; Bush was in fact much, much more aggressively partisan on the trail than Gore or Lieberman or their offical surregates.) At least two prominent liberal columinsts -- the WaPo's William Raspberry and Richard Cohen -- hoped openly for Bush to prevail in Florida because, in Cohen's words, the United States needed "a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse." Washington got its wish, the "center held" and The Concilatator and his (probably permanent) Republican Congress ushered in the most openly, aggressively right wing era in American history. By the 2004 election, Washington had come to prefer the only-slightly-too-liberal Kerry, but that was really just a matter of taste. Certainly, the establishment had more or less acquiesced in the idea that a president presiding over half-trillion dollar deficits fuelled by permanent tax cuts; leading a messy, expensive pre-emptive occupation of a Middle Eastern country badly engineered by what four years ago was an obscure, largely academic foreign policy thinktank; openly championing a constitutional ban on gay marriage; and running exactly the sort of ugly, demagogic campaign pundits had railed against in theory four years earlier, was only slightly too extreme for comfort. And, as of this Monday, Lindsay Graham and John Warner now apparently define what it is to be a "moderate". Which is to say that "the center", redefined as need be, just keeps on holding. The status quo is left mercifully intact. No hard choices are made, no essential realities confronted. And Official Washington is pleased as punch.
And maybe, just maybe, as Kaus suggests, this worship of politics without conflict has a grounding in something more than just the healthy democratic aversion to radical political change that we'd expect from the fourth estate -- or even basic journalistic laziness.
P.P.S.: One question is whether the Dems can yell "extraordinary" and filibuster if Bush in the future names to the Supreme Court one of the three people (Owen, Brown, Pryor) the Dem "moderates" have just agreed not to filibuster for lower federal courts. My reading of the deal is that they can, especially if they are able to latch onto something one of the three writes between now and then. But Republicans would find it easier to yell "bad faith" for these three than for other nominees. If the Democrats have just given Janice Rogers Brown a free pass to the Supreme Court, maybe the deal isn't as favorable to them as I think it is. ...
Bush isn't likely to nominate Brown or either of the other two to the Supreme Court before the end of the 109th Congress. But as I argued Monday, under the deal, the 110th Congress is likely to be a brave new world. Owen was just confirmed to the federal appellate court 56-43; Landrieu (D-LA) and Byrd (D-VA) joined the Republicans in voting "aye", lending the sacred bipartisan impremateur. That's the real Republican victory in the filibuster deal: the Democrats, by agreeing to it, have defined extremism down, which could have long-run consequences if the Dems don't gain seats in the midterm. (Again, in Reid's and his mod squad's defence, I don't necessarily think that there was a viable alternative to accepting the deal.)
Kaus' best post in a while, though, concerns Washington's rather appalling "cult of moderation" that has led to the usual adulation for those savvy centrist deal-cutters:
Why, after all, are so many people in Washington attached to the Senate's "right to unlimited debate"? Is it because the filibuster--which effectively requires a supermajority to pass anything through the Senate-- guarantees "freedom of speech, freedom of debate and freedom to dissent in the United States Senate." (Sen. Byrd's modest version.) Or is it because the filibuster, and the exaggerated power it gives to both minorities and individuals, is the basis for much of the Senate's--indeed Washington's--corrupt cash economy? Without the filibuster, after all, senators in the minority party wouldn't be nearly as big a deal....
...The filibuster's infrastructural role has powerful multiplier effect: It means not only that obscure minority Senators attract millions in campaign contributions. while the aides of obscure minority Senators aides find pleasant $250,000 jobs as influencers with vital "access." It means that those Senators can afford to hire well-paid fundraisers to funnel those contributions, while interest groups need direct mail experts to raise the money to make their own "access" producing contributions, and all these people need restaurants like The Palm to feed them and brokers to swap their houses and mechanics to service their Acuras and Audis. Thanks to the Senate's precious right of unlimited debate, a wave of prosperity sweeps over the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area! Funded by the rest of the country.
The filibuster is to Washington what the computer chip is to Palo Alto--the technological basis of prosperity. Is it an accident, a Marxist might say, that the Washington Post approves of McCain's handiwork? Without it, many of the talented lawyers who read the Post it might have had to find more productive, less remunerative work. And the paper wouldn't have all those real estate ads.
Not to worry. As another local hero, Sen. Graham, declared yesterday: "The Senate is back in business."
The judicial filibuster is important of course and plenty of Republican senators were ready to kill it. But it's the thought, not the details that define plausibility, that counts here. The endless celebration of "moderation" in Washington really is nauseating -- this is exactly the sort of talk that has made hacks like John Breaux not only possible but powerful Washington figures. Yesterday's official reaction to the filibuster deal was especially ripe. According to yesterday's NYT, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman declared, "In a Senate that's become increasingly partisan and polarized, the bipartisan center held." The Washington Post headlined its editorial "The Center Holds" and fawned that the deal "is a demonstration, in an era of increasingly bitter partisanship, of what can still be accomplished through negotiation and the proffer of a modicum of trust across the aisle." It went on to assail the interest groups who "railed against compromise and threatened its architects; Senate leaders of both parties and the president did more to obstruct a deal than to facilitate it. The 14 senators nonetheless managed to put principle above self-protection." John McCain, the deal's chief architect apparently (and, as per usual, the hero of the day) agreed, telling the New York Times that interest groups were upset "think[ing] of all the money they are going to lose," he said, ducking into a car to head to the premiere of a film about his life...
The dirty little secret of all this self-congratulation and hosannas for "principle" among the Mods is that, for all the talk of raging extremism, in today's Washington the center always holds. The real question we, and David Broder when he comes out of his latest McCain swoon, ought to be asking is what exactly is this "center" that keeps on holding? Remember back toward the end of the 2000 campaign that basically the entire Washington press decided that Bush, who repeated his "bring people together" and "change the tone in Washington" mantras over and over was the real "bipartisan", concensus candidate (this was bogus even at the time; Bush was in fact much, much more aggressively partisan on the trail than Gore or Lieberman or their offical surregates.) At least two prominent liberal columinsts -- the WaPo's William Raspberry and Richard Cohen -- hoped openly for Bush to prevail in Florida because, in Cohen's words, the United States needed "a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse." Washington got its wish, the "center held" and The Concilatator and his (probably permanent) Republican Congress ushered in the most openly, aggressively right wing era in American history. By the 2004 election, Washington had come to prefer the only-slightly-too-liberal Kerry, but that was really just a matter of taste. Certainly, the establishment had more or less acquiesced in the idea that a president presiding over half-trillion dollar deficits fuelled by permanent tax cuts; leading a messy, expensive pre-emptive occupation of a Middle Eastern country badly engineered by what four years ago was an obscure, largely academic foreign policy thinktank; openly championing a constitutional ban on gay marriage; and running exactly the sort of ugly, demagogic campaign pundits had railed against in theory four years earlier, was only slightly too extreme for comfort. And, as of this Monday, Lindsay Graham and John Warner now apparently define what it is to be a "moderate". Which is to say that "the center", redefined as need be, just keeps on holding. The status quo is left mercifully intact. No hard choices are made, no essential realities confronted. And Official Washington is pleased as punch.
And maybe, just maybe, as Kaus suggests, this worship of politics without conflict has a grounding in something more than just the healthy democratic aversion to radical political change that we'd expect from the fourth estate -- or even basic journalistic laziness.
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