Boffoblog

Our Budget Priorities

Peter Daou alerted me (and some other bloggers) about survey results on Americans' budget priorities from  a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland.  You can read the report here and the raw results here.

Overall, the results should cause some concern among Republicans, especially the fiscal conservatives.  In a nutshell, respondents to the survey would prefer to cut defense, reduce the deficit, and raise spending for domestic programs like education, renewable energy and veterans.

The portion of the study I like was one where the respondents were given a fixed budget -- $1000 in tax money -- and asked to allocate it among seventeen budget areas and an eighteenth item for deficit reduction.  On the computer- assisted task, they got instant feedback for a budget allocation on a given item by showing the resulting increases or decreases in all remaining areas. This permitted them to fiddle with the allocations to arrive at their optimal hypothetical budget.  They also saw how the administration's own budget compared.

This method is superior to nearly all opinion surveys on budget priorities which essentially give respondents a free lunch.  Typically, a questionnaire asks only whether one wants to increase or decrease defense spending, increase or decrease education, etc.  In other words, one is freely given the option of saying "increase" to everything -- and then ask for a tax cut, to boot!  While that kind of budgeting might make sense to Bush's OMB, that is not how the real world works ordinarily.  Inevitably, budgets force difficult tradeoffs, especially in an era of large deficits.  Beware any survey results which do not ask respondents to make tradeoffs.

(For those wanting to delve deeper into public opinion on the budget, check out "Individuals, Institutions, and Public Preferences over Public Finance" by John Mark Hansen in the Sept. 1998 issue of the American Political Science Review.)

The PIPA survey does have some of the traditional free-lunch questions, but the budget task puts them into perspective.  Among other things, the exercise reveals that people want to reserve a much larger proportion of the budget for deficit reduction -- that is to say, any -- and to increase substantially contributions to the UN, job training and investment in energy conservation and renewables.  The biggest cuts?  Defense and supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush budget is to the right not just of Democrats but of the average Republican response on the survey as well.  For sixteen of the eighteen areas, Republicans shifted their allocations in the same direction as Democrats relative to the Bush budget.  Though GOP respondents in general are more to the right than Democrats in all cases -- no surprise -- they are more moderate than the White House in nearly all cases.  And dare I say more sensible as well.

In this light, it is even less surprising that the GOP is having to temper its enthusiasm for further tax cuts, taking them off the table for now in order to satisfy other budget goals, as the Washington Post reported.  The White House, not least due to over-reaching on Social Security, is feeling the pressure from both inside and outside.  Another item on the second term agenda falls by the wayside.

GOP Falsehoods on the Filibuster

Jeffrey Toobin has an article in the current New Yorker on the fuss over the filibuster.  I'd like to say something more detailed about it in the next day or two, but for now just a few quick-hit responses to claims and rhetoric by the GOP:

• In keeping with the privatization -> private accounts -> personal accounts rhetorical evolution, the Newspeak version of the nuclear option is the "constitutional option."  Apparently calling it that makes it so.  But as the story shows, some GOP senators -- the moderates and the "traditionalists" -- are uncomfortable with removing the filibuster by fiat.  From here on in, one way to see where a senator stands is by listening for the label they use.  Let's start a tally: McCain and Specter call it the nuclear option, and Collins sits on the fence by using both names.  That's not even getting to the several others who expressed reservations.  Perhaps that is why, despite rumors Frist would force the Dems' hand in February, the nuclear option has stayed parked in the silo: They might not have enough votes to win a simple majority.  Wouldn't that be ironic.

• Grassley says "Filibusters are designed so that the minority can bring about compromise on legislation. You can always change the words of a bill or the dollars involved. But you can’t compromise a Presidential nomination. It’s yes or no. So filibusters on nominations are an abuse of our function under the Constitution to advise and consent."  First, the history is false.  The filibuster arose by accident, near as anyone can tell, due to an oversight in a rules rewrite early in the 19th century.  Beware anyone on the right or the left saying the filibuster was "designed" for anything in particular.  It was not.  Like most of the rules in Congress, their purpose comes from their use.  Second, one can certainly compromise on a nomination -- by putting forward a more moderate nominee.  The filibuster functions no differently for a nomination than for a bill.

• Part of the strategy behind the nuclear option, as Toobin describes, is that a federal court would be extremely unlikely to overturn a rule change adopted by the Senate.  The reason?  Article I, Section 5 which permits each chamber of Congress to decide its own procedures.  Ah, but there's the rub.  It is for that very reason that a federal court would not declare the cloture rule and the filibuster unconstitutional either, despite the argument of Hatch, Frist and friends.  It should hardly be surprising that for all the bluster raised, they have not whispered one syllable about challenging the practice in court.  They won't because they'd lose.  Thus, the claim that the filibuster is unconstitutional is false.  The nuclear option is the strategy that eats itself.

• If the point of order against a filibuster is raised on the basis that the action is dilatory, that, too, bespeaks the hollowness of the strategy.  For one, a perfectly forthright effort by the minority to engage in extended deliberation over a nominee might well be perceived by an annoyed majority as a dilatory tactic.  Yet, that is not the standard put forward.  Instead, we are meant to consider whether the filibuster of a nominee is per se dilatory.  On what basis?  Because it delays a vote?  Well, so does any debate.  Here the contrast with the last great effort in Congress to do away with dilatory tactics, the House circa 1890, is instructive.  At that time, all action ground to a halt due to the "disappearing quorum" -- members were present but refused to heed a quorum call, depriving the House the majority it needed to proceed.  The tactic did not involve any deliberation -- indeed, it involved nothing but refusing to answer -- and so could quite easily be labeled dilatory.  The filibuster is another animal entirely, because here it involves action indistinguishable from ordinary Senate business -- debate -- but for the fact that the majority lacks the votes to impose cloture in order to end it.