What Goes Around. . .

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently stated he anticipates more bipartisan cooperation in 2018.  That's right, Mitch McConnell said that.  The same Mitch McConnell who bragged about stonewalling former President Obama's Supreme Court nominee in Obama's final year in office.  The same McConnell who was an integral part of the opposition party's obstructionist strategy.  It doesn't take an expert pundit to figure out what's going on here: McConnell knows the GOP will get crushed in next year's midterms, so he's suddenly realized the value of cooperation so he can extract some favorable legislation before his political capital expires.  So now he wants to play nice - how convenient.  There are probably countless members of the Democratic Party, both voters and elected officials, who don't feel McConnell and the GOP deserve any quarter whatsoever, and who have no intention of cutting them even a millimeter of slack; and given Republicans' conduct during the last eight years, who could blame them?

Here's the thing, though: as gratifying as telling the GOP to get stuffed sounds, it's a bad idea - for a combination of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.  (Quick note: I'm referring almost entirely to the obscure Congressional rules in this post, not any policy positions; as far as I'm concerned, the GOP is on the wrong side of history on many contemporary social issues - civil rights, environmental protections, education, the church/state separation, among others - and they don't deserve any consideration on these points.  History and sociological research have already rendered verdicts, and it's time for the GOP's policy stances to be thrown onto the pile of failed ideas.  Okay - tangent over.) For one thing, neither party manages to hold a majority forever, so any procedural changes a party makes to the will eventually get passed along to the other party; and when that happens, you're giving the opposition better tools to push its agenda and undo your accomplishments.  It's foolishly shortsighted to behave as if you'll be the party in power for more than a few years, and that the changes you make won't come back to haunt you.  For another, some politicians have long memories and vindictive attitudes; so any Democratic politicians' pettiness or slights will get filed away in the "what goes around, comes around" cabinet.

Something needs to be done, though, because the GOP went beyond an opposition party to sabotaging the government with their obstructionist tactics.  Here's a baseball analogy: have you ever watched a game where the batter steps out of the box over and over, to frustrate the pitcher and get him to do something dumb? It's technically within the rules, but it's an unsportsmanlike exploitation of a loophole.  That's exactly what the GOP did with Merrick Garland: the Constitution says the Senate gives "advice and consent" over SCOTUS nominees, so the Senate had no obligation to give Garland a nomination hearing.

Someone might ask why Congress doesn't just rewrite the rules so there aren't loopholes for any party to exploit.  It's a pretty obvious solution, after all; but saying it would be difficult is like saying the sun is kind of warm.  Let's take a look at the possible ways of going about it, and all the obstacles in the way.

• The White House/Supreme Court intervenes.  Nope, awful idea.  Congress is, in many ways, a self-policing organization, and that's by design according to the principles of separation of powers and checks & balances.  Letting it write its own procedural rules leads to some disastrous results, as anyone who pays attention to government knows; but designating the Executive or Judicial Branch to manage it means Congress ceases to exist as a coequal branch of government.  Additionally, reforming Congress is outside the scope of either of the other two governmental branches.  This might solve the problem of Congressional mismanagement, but creates a far bigger one.
• Congress reforms itself.  Good luck making this happen.  Neither of the two parties truly wants to close any of those procedural loopholes.  As I already explained, the majority party likes having those little "cheat codes" while they're in power, and the minority party knows it will have its own turn sooner or later.  (For example, the Garland nomination fiasco: Mitch McConnell rightly accused the Democratic Party of hypocrisy, noting that it had done nearly the same thing during the Bush II Administration.) Those little political machinations also provide good material for reelection ads: "The other party did X, Y, and Z. Send me back to Washington and I'll clean up its mess." Which they might, but not in a way that solves the underlying issue or that can't be reversed within a few election cycles.  Senators and Representatives like those procedural tricks, and the only way to put a stop to it would be to "reboot" Congress: send every single member packing (What, you think they all came in knowing how to manipulate the processes? Someone more experienced taught them.), and strip away all those arcane rules that accumulated over the decades.
• An outside oversight agency.  There are risks involved, such as the agency being co-opted or supplanted by political insiders, and its mission distorted and turned into a partisan weapon.  Case in point: between 1976 and 1988, the League of Women Voters organized and hosted presidential debates; unfortunately, the League relinquished the task to the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization established by the two major parties that has drawn criticism for allegedly working to exclude 3rd-party candidates.  Even if the agency was not co-opted, it would still add another layer of bureaucracy to the federal government.  
• Grassroots efforts (ballot initiatives, etc.).  It has potential, especially as people have gotten more politically active during Trump's administration; but there's no guarantee that the momentum will sustain itself.  Some Americans also possess more zeal than knowledge, and that's a moderate problem with this approach.

Those are some pretty big challenges to overcome, so the likelihood of forging a cooperative set of rules is very slim.  Not impossible, but very unlikely.  There's one other thing to consider: the risk of going too far.  I've already given my take, which is that the GOP is going beyond acting like a minority party; but many of those "cheat codes" serve an important purpose in a democracy.  A minority party needs some protections, to keep the majority from imposing its will at every turn.  This creates a lot of watered-down and unpopular compromises, but hey, that's democracy.  The GOP's obstructionism could provoke a predictable overreaction that sweeps away many important safeguards against the tyranny of the majority.  That cure would be worse than the disease.

Bottom line: I think we're stuck with what we have now.  The likely outcome is that nothing changes, and the best case scenario is a very modest improvement.  That's not very rose-colored, but it is what it is.

The Question of Equality

There was this short story Kurt Vonnegut published in 1961 called Harrison Bergeron. I first read when I was a freshman at Gonzaga University, back in 1998, and it kind of stuck with me since then.  It's short enough that you can read the whole thing in about five minutes (here's a link to the whole story), but a core element of the story is that it's set in a society where everybody has been made equal. Intelligent people wear earphones that broadcast distracting noises at regular intervals, attractive people wear ugly masks, strong people must constantly wear extra weights, and so on.  The reason for this was to discourage competition and make sure nobody had an advantage over anybody else.

So why am I talking about some fifty-year-old Vonnegut novella that I read about a long time ago? Well, because it's core theme of universal equality ties in to a bunch of centuries-old writings by some very smart and observant people. First, there was this French citizen named Alexis De Tocqueville.  Tocqueville spent some time in the United States a few decades after the Revolutionary War and the signing of the Constitution.  At the time of his journey, democracy was something of a new concept in the Western world, and France was one country still figuring out what it meant. Tocqueville found many things to praise about American democracy, but he also found some potential flaws.

One such problem was what Tocqueville called the "equality of conditions", a phenomenon which he felt could eventually lead to a lack of freedom.  His thinking was that the seeds of the problem were planted because democracies tend to grant significant authority to the citizens, giving them the impression that their opinions mattered just as much as anyone else's.  Tocqueville believed this could lead to the tyranny of the majority pretty quickly, as well as setting the stage for further problems.  First, he speculated that the fear of tyranny of the majority would cause some people to grow reluctant to voice their opinions, so they didn't land on the wrong side of the issue as the majority.  If you don't think that could happen, go read up on the Asch Experiments.

Tocqueville also worried that the fear of majority rule could lead to a backlash, where citizens developed a skewed version of individualism, one marked by increased materialism.  I don't fully understand Tocqueville's points here, but he seems to be saying that the materialism becomes a way for someone to reaffirm their individual significance: "Look at all the stuff I have! I matter!" This individualism would also lead to a breakdown in communal bonds (something Tocqueville considered important).  As people became more isolated, they turned to the government to provide goods and services which their communities once did.  Tocqueville called this condition of being overly reliant on the government "democratic despotism", which created a massive bureaucratic government that could easily enforce real despotism.  The Founders were really worried about that, remember?

(By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that Tocqueville is a fan of conservatives and libertarians, because of his remarks about "democratic despotism"; one site I visited while researching this piece tried to connect social safety programs to Tocqueville's despotism and socialism/communism.  Quite the slippery slope argument.)  

Tocqueville understood that there was an inverse relationship between equality and liberty, and so did the Founders.  This is pointed out in Federalist 10, one of the most well known Federalist writings, in a slightly roundabout way:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.  There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.  There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

I've been making a roundabout argument myself, but I'm referencing Vonnegut and Tocqueville to point out the parallels between Vonnegut's story and Tocqueville's observations.  Vonnegut was being somewhat satirical by taking the concept of equality to an absurd conclusion, but the dangers Tocqueville foresaw are real.  And to some degree, they have already happened: I think the 2016 election is a good example of what happens when a large number of people decide that their uninformed opinions are just as valid as the opinions of people who have done their research.  Tocqueville understood what Socrates taught several hundred years ago, regarding the dangers of democracy; and I think he'd also agree wholeheartedly with this awesome quote.

So am I against legislation like the Civil Rights Act, the ADA, the social safety net, a progressive income tax, and all the other programs that help make the playing field a little less uneven? Of course not.  I'm just pointing out the potential dangers of taking it too far.  There is also another type of equality I think is preferable: equality of opportunity.  I didn't get a chance to really look into it in-depth, but an easy analogy is a running race, where everybody takes off from the same starting line. This picture sums up what I think is an optimal solution to work toward.

 So, that is kind of a long one.  I guess I was making up for taking such a long break.  Anyway, enjoy.