The passing of Sen. John McCain provides a poignant moment to not only reflect on his political legacy but also reflect on the nature and value of a “maverick.” McCain’s political career was filled with a variety of seeming contradictions (such as his complicated record on torture), but two things were constant: McCain was both a Republican and, especially later in his career, willing to break with his party.

Part of why McCain was described as a maverick is because many of his most significant breaks with his party (such as on climate change, immigration, and, of course, campaign finance) were seemingly based on principle and the details of the policy itself, rather than some innate desire for “consensus” or “bipartisanship.”

Similarly, while McCain was recognized as a senator who could work “across the aisle” in pursuit of a common goal, he did not have a reputation as a dealmaker who was seen to break with his party in order simply “to get a deal done.” Indeed, as I return to below, many of McCain’s efforts (like on climate change and immigration) were ultimately unsuccessful. But because his motivations were at least seen as being based on his ideological principles, his status as a maverick was important because he conveyed information about proposed policies — even when he did not break with his party.

The informational value of the maverick

Of course, there are many reasons to be sad that Sen. McCain is no longer among us. I want to focus on why it is particularly sad for the GOP to lose a maverick. It’s not a partisan point, and indeed is not timebound: The argument applies to any party. In a busy world in which legislation and the processes by which it is produced are often opaque, mavericks are the canaries in the coal mine. Just as the miner must pause and reconsider his or her course of action when the canary dies, a voter should take notice when the maverick breaks with his or her party and ask, “Why?”

McCain’s work on climate change presents a good example of this dynamic. Between 2003 and 2007, the GOP leadership was actively opposed to climate change legislation — for example, in 2003, GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe, at the time the chair of the Senate Environment Committee, famously declared global warming to be “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” In spite of this opposition, McCain and Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman co-sponsored three ultimately unsuccessful cap-and-trade bills. McCain’s efforts might lead a voter to question the degree to which the GOP party line was truly in line with conservative principles.

Clearly, a maverick like McCain or Russ Feingold can be informative to voters on both sides of the aisle by breaking with his or her party. In addition, by demonstrating a willingness to break with the party, a maverick can be informative when he or she does not break with his or her party. Indeed, standing with one’s party is the norm for a successful maverick; breaking with the party too often can lead voters to suspect that the member’s ideological leanings are not in line with those of his or her party (see the fates of former Sens. Leiberman and Arlen Specter).

In other words, because many people believed McCain to be a principled conservative and willing to break with the GOP leadership, then when McCain supported his party on any given bill, a voter should have a stronger belief that the bill was in line with “conservative principles.’’ If McCain were not a maverick, then his support for his party’s agenda would be less informative about the content of the agenda itself.

Bipartisanship, or co-maverickship?

In a two-party system, mavericks necessarily will appear to be more “bipartisan” than other members, but it is important to keep in mind that the most informative mavericks must be at least perceived to be strong partisans. McCain’s behavior was a perfect example of this: On both climate change or campaign finance, the senator did not just partner with a Democrat — he partnered with a fellow maverick.

In both cases, McCain could rely on garnering significant (but generally less than unanimous) Democratic support. If he had simply crossed the aisle on these issues, rather than partnering with a senator known to break the Democratic leadership, he probably would have found it more difficult to secure support from his GOP colleagues. For example, when he teamed up with Sen. Ted Kennedy (and President George W. Bush) for immigration reform in 2007, their bipartisan legislation secured the support of only 12 of the 49 Republican senators and died in the Senate.

A loss for America and the GOP leadership

McCain’s passing is a loss for all Americans, but particularly for conservatives — ironically, precisely because he was an “unreliable” vote for the GOP. Losing McCain will ultimately hamper the GOP leadership’s ability to build coalitions and credibility on a host of issues. For example, in spite of the failure of the Kennedy-McCain bill, if Congress wants to tackle immigration reform, McCain’s support might have been pivotal, particularly among senators from border states.

In short, political parties and legislatures are made stronger by mavericks. Of course, mavericks are rare, almost by definition: If most incumbents have a tendency to break with their party, it eventually becomes difficult to discern what the “party line” is.

In a time when many voters are concerned about particularly concerned about holding members of Congress accountable (“draining the swamp”), the mavericks are more important than ever. In a complicated, opaque, and fast-moving policy environment, the — yes, sometimes maddening — efforts of mavericks help both voters and fellow members keep the big picture in focus.

In various ways and to varying degrees, McCain did this for more than 30 years. He will be missed.

The immigration debate in the US has been burning for more than two years. Most recently, it played a role in the failure of the farm bill last Friday. The rebellion by 30 Republican members on Friday’s vote was partly in pursuit of bringing an immigration bill, the Securing America’s Future Act of 2018 (HR 4760), to the floor for consideration.

The bill proposes significant policy changes, including but not limited to:

• Revising how immigrant visas (including family-related visas) are allocated
• Eliminating the “diversity visa program”
• Revising annual immigration levels, increasing the amount of employment-based immigration
• Changing the H-2C temporary agricultural worker program
• Authorizing DNA testing to establish family relationships

Phew. Take a minute.

While HR 4760, like all immigration policy, is complicated, it is accurate to say that it would tighten limits on immigration. Accordingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, every one of the bill’s 96 co-sponsors is a Republican. That’s more than 40% of the GOP caucus! (Very close to 50 percent: see the Hastert Rule.)

The details of the charge to discharge HR 4760 to the floor are interesting but more than a bit complicated, so I’ll leave the finer details for a future post. What I want to point out today are two simple facts and then the surprising development that, if I were Speaker Ryan, I would be worried about:

1. Before a discharge petition is effective, a majority of the total membership (218 members) must sign it. Of course, this requires that at least one member of the majority party signs it.
2. It is incredibly rare for a member of the majority party to sign any discharge petition. It is an (incredibly impotent) “weapon” of the minority. Key point here: The discharge petition for the rule to consider HR 4760 was initiated and first signed by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL). There are (unsurprisingly, given the vote on the farm bill last Friday) GOP dissidents on immigration who are willing to publicly stand against Ryan and the GOP leadership. But intra-partisan warfare on its own is one “inside baseball” thing. Getting these intraparty schisms to the floor requires acquiescence from the minority party — acquiescence, at least in appearances, to a bill that moves policy further from what the minority party wants.

The surprising development

In the past three days, the discharge petition for HR 4760 has gained 12 signatures, bringing it to 213 (just five shy of the required 218). Of those 12 signatures, 10 are from Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. The House clerk’s office (understandably) makes it hard to figure out the partisanship of the signers of a discharge petition. But given that there are only 193 Democratic members of the House, we can safely conclude that at least 20 Republicans have signed the petition.

And the signatures of Pelosi and Hoyer (minority leader and whip, respectively) are meaningful. They just signed today (May 24, 2018) and more importantly, they are presumably opposed to HR 4760.

Accordingly, what is happening is that the Democratic leadership is “punking” Ryan and the GOP leadership: This bill divides his caucus. I would imagine they also have reason to suspect, with midterms approaching, that the bill will fail but greatly divide the GOP incumbents on what is currently, for the GOP but not the Democrats, a hot-button primary election issue. It’s a strategy of juicing the other side’s primaries, if you will. It only takes five more signatures to make this GOP “grenade” go live.

What is the right policy?

Even on purely economic grounds, immigration is already complicated: Tightening immigration increases wages for voters and accordingly increases labor costs for employers. Regardless of partisan leanings, all districts have both workers and employers. Thus, even leaving both district partisanship and the human benefits and costs of immigration aside, immigration policy has unclear impacts on any district’s economy.

Even with that in hand, many citizens from both sides of the aisle will agree that the proper immigration policy is about more than economic benefits/costs. What’s the right course? In the end, Republican and Democratic members of Congress have to account for and measure out the costs and benefits of having more or less open borders. Ultimately, making this call on policy is tough on even the best of days.

Accordingly, I’ll leave to others, as I always do (especially after I check my pay for blogging about this), the question of the proper policy balance. Instead, my point here is to simply point out what I see to be the trade-offs.

Final thoughts

Before I go, a quick note for those playing at home: A member can take his or her signature off a discharge petition until it has 218 signatures, at which point it is frozen. Thus, this is kind of like a “Tarantino meets House of Cards” storyline in the making: It would be fun if it weren’t centered on such a serious policy matter.

That said, the serenity prayer suggests to me that I grab my popcorn and simply lie back to see how Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Pelosi, and Hoyer work out this waltz. For them and the republic, I wish them and their colleagues godspeed. I suspect they will need divine intervention to fashion a compromise on these issues.

The House of Representatives typically takes several votes every day it’s in session. Some are bipartisan “hurrah” votes, some are high-stakes, closely divided votes, and some are simply “procedural” votes. A classic example of such a vote is on approving the House Journal. This is basically a vote on whether to approve the minutes from the previous day’s business.

Formally, these votes are pro forma and, importantly, optional. Practically, they tend to occur only on days on which important and/or divisive business might be considered. (I wrote an article on this several years ago.) The House has dealt with two such matters in the past few days: the farm bill on Friday and a significant rollback of Dodd-Frank on Tuesday.

Recording a vote on the journal is an opportunity for party leaders to call members to the floor and “whip” them, seeking information and the possibility of swaying their votes. What is interesting — to me, at least — is that these votes on the pro forma motion appear to possibly be informative about the matter to be considered later that day. Disapproving the journal has never occurred and would simply delay business while the journal is read and opened to amendment. Thus, a vote against approval is (at best) simply a protest or dilatory maneuver. That said, the journal was approved Tuesday by a vote of 219-179.

Furthermore, the recent journal vote, like many, was informative. Only 33 Democrats voted in favor of the bill. Of those, 21 voted against approving the journal.

From the other side of the aisle, 75 Republicans voted against approving the journal but then voted for the bill. These members have nearly double the rate of unpredictability (average “misprediction,” according to their NOMINATE estimates in the 115th Congress) of their fellow Republicans who voted to approve the journal. The same is true of the 21 Democrats who voted against approving the journal but then voted for the bill. The 65 Democrats who voted in favor of approving the journal but then voted against the bill are slightly more predictable than their fellow Democrats.

(As an aside, Democrats and Republicans are currently almost equally predictable on average, though the Republicans have more “relatively highly unpredictable” members than do the Democrats, in line with Friday’s farm bill vote.)

My take? The House was voting on essentially the final, compromise version of the bill. Some GOP representatives were unhappy with it. A meaningful faction of Democrats broke with the party line and signaled their intentions through the journal vote. Why did they do this? I don’t know what was going on in real time on the House floor, but I suspect that the journal vote might be kind of like “going on the record” for the insiders regarding the business of the day.

In line with this, I include pictures of how the journal and passage votes went down. Notice that the journal vote looks a lot messier than the passage vote. In both of the pictures, light blue and red upside-down triangles indicate “nay” votes and darker blue and red right-side-up triangles denote “yea” votes. Here’s the very messy vote on approving the journal.

Now, hours later, here’s the very classical partisan/ideological split on passage of the changes to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation.

Congress has at least two faces: One is internal, concerned with policy, procedure, and bargaining; the other is simultaneously about policy, public image, and reelection. Today, for those looking closely, Congress showed both faces within a few hours of each other. Minutiae in the moment can sometimes be tea leaves for the future.

The (first crack at the) semi-decennial farm bill failed on Friday. Many commentators have focused on the failure as an example of how immigration continues to tear apart the GOP caucus. That immigration is dividing the GOP is unassailable as fact — but the farm bill did not fail because of that. For that to be the case, every bill that deals with immigration in some way (which would be every bill dealing with labor or law enforcement, to name only two issues) would presumably fail as well.

This farm bill failed for multiple reasons. The first is uninteresting but important: Given the partisan divide (see below), this version of the bill would not survive an almost certain filibuster in the Senate. So it was arguably grandstanding and/or Speaker Paul Ryan plumbing the depths of his support within the conference regarding appropriations.

The second is more interesting (though less mutable). The farm bill has, especially in the scholarly discussions of American politics over the past 50 years, been held up as a classic example of “strange bedfellows” in politics. In normal times, the farm bill was ultimately designed to offer benefits to both very rural and very urban districts, essentially subsidized by suburban districts. This was accomplished by providing subsidies to farmers while also providing subsidized food to poor urban Americans, through either SNAP (food stamps) or subsidized school breakfasts and lunches.

This quid pro quo was impressively resilient. The initial farm bill was passed in 1933! As opposed to then (or even in 1990), the electoral geography of the US has changed remarkably. Simply put, there are few to no Democratic “farm” districts and few to no Republican “urban” districts. Geographical sorting and/or gerrymandering, combined with intensified partisanship, has made sustaining the “farm-to-school” coalition much less tenable than it was 30 years ago. The history of the farm bill since 2008 illustrates this breakdown.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the subsidies contained in the farm bill are socially good or bad. Any meaningful farm bill essentially must be redistributing income, so the ultimate evaluation about whether such a bill is a good idea ultimately must rest on the outcomes from the bill relative to such redistribution.

That said, farm bills passed without much fanfare for more than 70 years (i.e., more than a dozen such bills were enacted), and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Unless I’m missing something, none of the “fundamentals” about the farm bill changed between 2003 and 2008. That is, aside from the political landscape. Simply put, there used to be common ground between rural and urban areas in America. Friday’s failure of the farm bill — in a unified Congress with a co-partisan sitting in the White House — suggests that this is no longer the case.

The following map of how House members voted demonstrates this. The light blue and light red districts denote districts represented by members (light blue: Democratic, light red: Republican) who voted nay on the farm bill. Given the unanimous opposition by Democrats on Friday’s vote and the Democratic Party’s current seat advantage in urban districts, it is unsurprising that most members from urban districts voted on the opposite side of most members from rural districts.

To contrast this with previous farm bill votes, consider the next map, which illustrates the votes on passage of the 1985 farm bill.

Not only was passage of the 1985 farm bill bipartisan (Democrats: 184 yeas, 62 nays; Republicans: 98 yeas, 79 nays), it won support in both urban and rural districts.

Partisanship and ideology. Viewing the structure of these two votes from a higher level that incorporates and compares members across many votes on many issues is illuminating. The first figure illustrates how the farm bill vote on May 18 divided the GOP. The light red upside-down triangles represent the members of the GOP who voted against the bill. Note that they are “close together” relative to the group of all dark and light red triangles, which represent all of the GOP members. This group of legislators is the faction that stood up against Ryan, at least in part in pursuit of more aggressive action on immigration policy.

Now, turning back to the passage vote on the 1985 farm bill, the next figure contains both light blue and light red upside-down triangles, which again represent the members who voted against the 1985 bill. The key point is that these nay votes are “scattered throughout” the membership of the House.

In other words, while the 2018 vote is consistent with both partisanship (all the Democrats voted nay) and ideology (a coherent “ideological cluster” of GOP members defected from their leadership), the 1985 vote indicates little of either. This is because the 1985 farm bill was passed by a “strange bedfellows” coalition in which urban and rural districts joined forces in pursuit of redistributive benefits.

Polarization and policy. I don’t want to argue that pork-barrel politics is a “good thing,” of course. However, the farm bill has been more frequently delayed, and for increasingly long periods (the 2008 farm bill was passed over President George W. Bush’s veto, the 2013 farm bill failed, and the 2014 farm bill was delayed by more than two years). Regardless of whether we think farm and/or food subsidies are a good idea, if we’re going to have them, it makes sense for their passage to be orderly.

The vote on the 2018 farm bill demonstrates how at least two forces are stymieing congressional policymaking: polarization both between and within the party caucuses. Indeed, these forces are so strong right now that even what used to be near consensual business is fraught. It wasn’t always this way.

The Federal Air Marshal Service is under scrutiny. Operational problems appear to be serious and, if so, need rectifying. However, it is important to separate operational (day-to-day) problems from strategic (long-term/mission-oriented) ones. I can’t speak to the operational problems, but I can offer some caution about jumping to conclusions regarding strategic issues. On this point, in a piece detailing the challenges faced by the Air Marshal Service, the New York Times reported:

Representative John J. Duncan Jr., Republican of Tennessee and longtime critic of the air marshals program, said the agency averaged one arrest each year per 1,000 marshals. Most of those arrests were for rowdy passengers or immigration violations, according to several air marshals.

And instead of putting marshals on flights deemed to be the highest risk, they are spread across as many flights as possible, including on domestic regional 50-seat planes. The strategy has been ridiculed as “flights to nowhere” by the Air Marshal Association, a union that is pushing the Senate to approve a bill requiring that air marshals be assigned to higher-risk flights. (It has already passed the House.)

Let’s parse these two claims about what I’ll call the air marshals’ “strategy.”

First claim: Air marshals are ineffective. Rep. Duncan’s claim is essentially that the strategy is ineffective because the air marshals don’t arrest many people. This is, as it stands, a complaint with ambiguous value. To validate it as a legitimate complaint, one would need to establish what would occur on flights if the air marshals changed their strategy. To make it clear, if there were no air marshals, would the number of in-flight crimes go up? If not, then the strategy is ineffective. However, if the strategy is effective, then it is deterring in-flight crimes.

Second claim: Air marshals might be effective but are assigned ineffectively. The Air Marshal Association essentially claims that air marshals are assigned ineffectively because they are assigned to short/few passenger flights.

1. First, this is possibly silly because air marshals, like the rest of us, have to “get to the next flight.” All of us fly short, low-capacity routes to get to hubs for the bigger, longer flight that really matters.
2. Second, if the air marshals were assigned only to (say) flights with more than 150 passengers or traveling more than 500 miles, then a terrorist looking to avoid air marshals would target flights with fewer than 150 passengers or flying less than 500 miles. That predictability is a bad strategy, a point made in slightly different ways by Robert Powell in this article.
3. Third, and finally, it is important to note that Duncan’s claim and the Air Marshal Association’s claim are at odds with one another: If Duncan’s claim is correct, then the Air Marshal Association’s claim is irrelevant and vice versa.

Summing up, evaluating policy — which is typically aimed at big phenomena — can be harder than evaluating day-to-day performance. Both need to be constantly evaluated, but, particularly when it comes to security, it is important to recognize that the two can be very different.

Today in America, our leaders — on both sides — misunderstand power.

Power, properly applied, is rarely explicit, and even more rarely is possession of it claimed.

For a properly and adroitly powerful person, his or her power works behind the scenes. Indeed, the most powerful people might never even recognize the proper extent of their own power.

That said, our national culture in the United States is currently, clearly, and dangerously overfocused on demonstrating power. To expand a bit on the above, the greatest power is often that which one ought not to — and, more importantly, one need not to — claim.

While the example of King Charles I of England is arguably sufficient to prove the point, in more modern times one might simply consider the fall of Steve Bannon as a perfect example of this: By showing (or claiming) in a variety of ways that he had power in the White House, he ultimately (presumably) lost whatever power he had there.

Voters aren’t fools

Americans know that truly effective leaders don’t incessantly seek credit: When President Trump claims credit for outlandish or unearned achievements, we roll our eyes. Some (many Democrats) find this ridiculous and off-putting, while others (some Republicans) find it refreshing and even charming.

I will admit, there is value in shaking things up. That said, we’re talking about “shaking things up” in the White House — in the principal position of leadership of the world’s only superpower. This isn’t about breaking out of the rut of the usual date night at the local brewpub; it’s about national and global politics.

Being different is good, but the point here is that Trump, and too many of the leaders of both parties, is focused on demonstrating “power,” the exercise of which is seemingly equated with scoring a win. If all my opponents are trying to score a win, then whenever I give a concession to them, it easily follows that I must have scored a loss.’

This is a problem for reaching agreements because if we’re all supposed to value scoring wins, then we must all have a strict and distinct distaste for losses, right?

That’s the key point: in our current environment, losses repel and stymie agreement. Thus, if possible, one should get the “win” without making your opponent score the “loss.” Caring about “winning” in a visible context makes politics (unnecessarily) a zero-sum game. We have many places to compromise: Caring about winning, per se, only pushes us further away from the agreement that makes us both better.

So well known, so easy … yet so hard

The wisdom of making politics (or business, or marriage, or friendship, etc.) a “win-win” business is an old adage. It’s an old adage because it’s true: If we’re being honest, there’s nothing better than getting what you want while letting the other side claim a win. You get what you need while also being able to stand tall and, most importantly, know that you can work with the other side again.

Working over time with the same people requires sometimes taking the short end of the stick. It does not mean being the sucker: The implicit, “social” contract is that each side wins, and loses, sometime. This is where the frailty of the social contract emerges: When either side decides that it must win all the time, then — very quickly — there are no deals to be had. No agreement is possible. If there is agreement, it must be secured in a (backroom) way that allows both sides to claim victory.

So what’s the solution?

We have pressing issues that matter to the right, left, and middle of the political spectrum. These issues — education, health care, immigration, and infrastructure, to name only four — will require bipartisan buy-in to make progress. It’s complicated, and lots of decisions need to be made. Realistically, if we’re going make progress, no “side” is going to win on all of those decisions.

Given our current state of underinvestment in working together and our leaders’ current overinvestment in polarizing speech and acts, we must let our leaders know that losing on occasion not only can lead to, but indeed is necessary for, winning in the long term. After that, when we all finally kick back and extend our hands across the figurative aisle to each other, maybe we can acknowledge that we not only won but won together.

Senate Democrats have been criticized from both sides for having shut down the federal government (admittedly for only one workweek day). At the outset, President Trump described the move as threatening the security of the nation. At the conclusion, some liberal groups blamed Democrats for caving rather than keeping the government shut until a real deal on immigration was reached.

Moderate Senate Democrats took the middle road, accepting Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise to allow debate on an immigration bill in return for a short extension of funding for the government. Of course, taking the middle road leaves at least two other roads divided. In this case, the Democrats ultimately chose not to keep the government open or to dig in their heels in pursuit of a solution for the 690,000 DREAMers — immigrants protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump is ending.

Was the decision to reopen the government a smart one? If so, was it smart to cause a shutdown in the first place?

Maybe it was a bad idea to cause a shutdown

Obviously, one can argue that Democrats made a mistake in causing the shutdown in the first place. One classic argument is simply that the government should always remain open. Other, less absolute, arguments rest on the notion that Democrats essentially overplayed their hand this time.

That is, even though polls consistently show that there is broad support for the DREAMers, it was unclear whether more people would blame Trump and Republicans, or the Democrats, for a shutdown. Furthermore, even if a majority of voters initially blamed Trump and Republicans, it is difficult to project how that support would evolve as the shutdown started to have increasingly significant effects on the public and financial markets.

Maybe it was a bad idea to open the government

There are several reasons one might argue that Democrats’ mistake was not in shutting down the government but in allowing it to reopen without an immigration deal. For example, some argue that the Democrats are being taken advantage of by the Republicans. In addition, while the issue is polarizing within both parties, immigration is an issue that divides the Democratic Party more so than it does the Republican Party, and backing down just solidifies and deepens these divisions. Finally, backing down at this point, when their bargaining advantage appeared so significant, hurts Democrats’ future bargaining power.

Maybe both were good ideas

Admitting the plausibility of the arguments above, it is possible to argue that causing a short shutdown was the right move for Senate Democrats. The reason for this is, at its heart, very simple. Donald Trump is an unreliable ally, particularly on immigration. More generally, shutdown politics is the new normal and is increasingly relevant now that Trump is in the White House.

The 2018 midterm elections

Democrats and Republicans in both chambers have their eyes on November 6, 2018. Elections always loom large in congressional politics, of course, but the 2018 midterm election casts an especially long shadow for a variety of reasons. First, owing in part to the 2006 midterm election, the Democratic Party is defending far more Senate seats (24, plus two independents) than the GOP (eight). This is particularly important because if the Democrats and GOP split the 34 seats up for election this year, the GOP would have 60 senators in 2019.

Second, a combination of internal and external forces are leading many GOP incumbents to not seek reelection. For example, as of today, 34 Republican members of the House have announced they will not seek reelection, compared to only 15 Democrats. Regardless of whether one views those decisions as a cause or an effect, there is much higher uncertainty about which party will control the House of Representatives in 2019 than there was in 2016.

Shutdowns and elections

Because the federal government does not currently have a traditional budget and is, instead, funded through temporary budget extensions, the regularly recurring debates about the budget represent a reliable opportunity for both parties — and in particular the minority party — to garner the public’s attention.

Congressional elections are increasingly national affairs: The Republican and Democratic National Committees each play very more active roles in recruiting and financing candidates across the country. Potentially shutting down the government offers an opportunity to establish a “message” or “theme” for the party. Given that the Democrats are the minority party in both chambers of Congress, obstruction represents the only reliable tool they have to force the majority to the bargaining table, and shutting down the government represents the most reliable way to get the public to notice.

Once the issue of the DREAMers was linked with funding the government, Democrats were faced with the choice of signaling that it was an important issue around which they were unified, or publicly acknowledging that they were not willing to incur any cost to achieve immigration reform.

Shutdowns with Trump in the White House

When Republicans engaged in shutdown politics during President Obama’s administration, the scene was different: The GOP controlled both chambers of Congress and thus could present actual legislation, such as attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP could, and occasionally did, negotiate with Obama.

Things are more complicated with Trump in the White House. Realistically, any deal on immigration will require his signature. However, and simply put, Trump is a poor leader: He does not stay on message, his word cannot be relied upon by either his allies or his adversaries, and his actual policy positions are murky, to say the least.

Accordingly, it is very hard to see why members of either party would expect that a reliable bargain on immigration could be reached between themselves and Trump, and, ultimately, keeping the government shut for an extended period in pursuit of such a deal makes sense only if members of both parties think such a bargain can be reached.

A Goldilocks approach to obstruction

Showing a little backbone and demonstrating unity in the face of electoral pressure can ultimately help Senate Democrats. But key to these is the qualifier “a little.” After all, if one believes that Senate Republicans — not to mention House Republicans — are leery of sticking their necks out on a hot-button issue such as immigration without cover from the president, then one needs to believe that they will be extra leery of doing so under this president, regardless of what he says.

Keeping the government shut down for an extended period was not going to change the reality that most Republicans would be unwilling to take a stand that would quite possibly be the target of the next Twitter barrage from their party’s leader.

So incurring a significant amount of short-lived news cycle heat for taking a stand on DACA can be useful for Democrats: It draws attention to the unity of Senate Democrats around the issue without making the Democratic Party appear unreasonable.

With Trump in the White House, negotiating and making real policy on many important issues — like immigration and health care — will be replaced by maneuvers and gambits largely aimed at the 2018 elections. With the recent shutdown, Democrats have signaled that the DREAMers are going to be part of their message. In the next few weeks and months, we’ll see how Republicans respond in their attempt to shape their message for the midterm elections.

agenda, noun: A plan of things to be done or problems to be addressed.

The problem with Republicans’ agenda in Washington is that there is no plan. Indeed, the real problem is not even that there is no plan: It is that the fact there is no plan is plainly visible and not even denied. Regardless of whether we think the current situation represents one of “unified government,” the reality is that regardless of who is in the White House, the congressional Republicans have remained largely unchanged over the past few years. Accordingly, the fact that they are unable to come up with a common plan — or even a common set of talking points — speaks volumes about how the realities of President Trump’s America interact with the “weak party system” of the United States federal government.

Trump is president. The remainder of his party in Congress is subject to elections, and challenges, on a different schedule. Given that members of Congress typically value reelection but do not need Trump’s permission to seek it, Trump’s power over them is effectively limited to his power to persuade voters and help secure or deter their reelection goals. This power, it turns out, is finite.

For example, consider the (ironically labeled) Strange special election in Alabama, in which Luther Strange — the putative insider candidate, with Trump’s (admittedly tepid) endorsement — lost to outsider candidate Roy Moore. Accordingly, Trump’s ability to enforce party discipline through his power to endorse is clearly limited.

While Trump’s electoral power is circumscribed, his ability (and apparent willingness or proclivity) to cause electoral problems is seemingly unbounded. For example, consider the absolute mess created by Trump’s late-night kinda-sorta rescission of cost-sharing subsidy payments for health care insurance, or the desolate wasteland of unnecessary backlash initiated by his invocation of one of the most sensitive of duties of the commander in chief (contacting the relatives of armed services members who lost their lives in the line of service). The Republican Party has, collectively, not only consistently missed opportunities to make headway but has endured self-inflicted wounds on an astonishingly regular basis.  

Describing those two (of many) missteps requires at least two mouthfuls with a breath in between. In fact, together they represent an abomination with respect to Trump’s putative role as leader of the GOP. The fact that describing his missteps is so wordy and convoluted simply and vividly illustrates the crap storm that the GOP has inherited and seemingly countenances under his leadership.

To validate the assertion that “the GOP seemingly countenances” said crap storm, I simply note that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell met with Mr. Trump for lunch on Monday to declare that they “are together totally on this agenda…”  

My point here is not that the GOP should necessarily pursue its agenda or not; it’s rather a plea for coherence. After all, a “do nothing government” is at least doing nothing. In contrast, the GOP is currently occupying a huge swath of bandwidth with the equivalent of an animated GIF of the party shooting itself in the foot over and over. The good news is that fixing this should be easy. Here’s one simple guide to doing so:

1. Move on from health care. The reality is that nothing is going to work now.  It’s too fraught electorally, and, to be honest, Congress has no idea what to do, anyway. The Affordable Care Act is not perfect — but neither is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. We have made, and will make, changes to these major laws by amending them. For better or worse, depending on your political disposition, this is how changes will occur to the Affordable Care Act too. Even if only from an electoral position, “repeal and/or replace” is simply not feasible right now.
2. Tax reform. First: Take Trump out of the equation. Second: Congressional GOP leadership takes the mic. Speaker Paul Ryan is supposedly very interested in this dimension of policy, maybe even a “wonk” in this realm. So draw up and publicize a reform plan. I don’t know if I would agree with it, but I definitely know that the optics of it being Ryan’s plan, rather than that of conflict-of-interest-ridden President Trump, can only help its prospects of success.
3. Propose a realistic, non-draconian budget. The initial budget proposal is silly. Simply put, it doesn’t actually work arithmetically, and, more importantly from a political standpoint, it is DOA. Budgets are like soufflés: While they are baking, walk softly or start over.

I could dig deeper about other “priorities” for the GOP prior to 2018, but realistically, getting a real budget — not a contrived continuing resolution — passed seems to be a stretch. Tax reform is “possible,” and worth going after, from a programmatic/agenda perspective. But none of it happens if the GOP doesn’t set repealing the ACA to the side for the time being.

An apocryphal quote attributed to Albert Einstein is a fitting send-off: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell would be well advised to keep this in mind as they plot out the few months remaining before the midterm election cycle gets into full swing.

President Trump recently said that the Republicans in Congress should wait for the Affordable Care Act to “fail” and then replace it. This is a facile rhetorical strategy. First, it shifts the blame: Replace with what? Trump has been simultaneously evasive and vacuous on the question of how he would fix what, in his own words, is a complicated issue. But more interestingly, the strategy is brazen: believing something is clearly broken but declaring that we shouldn’t fix it. This is a horrible way to make policy and, in the case of health insurance, quite possibly nonsensical.

Is waiting for policy failure a good way to prompt policy change? As an argument that it isn’t a good idea, I refer to Hurricane Katrina. Faced with Category 5 winds and surging waves, New Orleans was ultimately swamped by rain and flood waters in 2005. It caused 1,836 deaths and was the costliest natural disaster in history, costing approximately $108 billion.

This was clearly a policy failure — even though the hurricane itself was a random event, the risk was known, as were methods to mitigate those risks. As stated in the report prepared by the bipartisan congressional committee that investigated preparations for and responses to Hurricane Katrina:

Even with its hurricane protection system, it was common knowledge that New Orleans was susceptible to hurricane-caused flooding. The risks of a major hurricane and flooding in New Orleans had been covered in the general media — by Scientific American (October 2001) and National Geographic (October 2004) — as well as in emergency management literature.

Furthermore, the government was aware of the risks (for example, see this 2004 report). Proper preparation and response to events like Katrina are systems that require planning, resources, and maintenance — just like complex markets such as those for health insurance in the various states. When systems clearly collapse, we can’t just hit reset, wipe the board clean, and restart everything anew. Rather, when a system fails, damage is done, and some of it is permanent.

When has an insurance market collapsed? Even if we agree that letting the ACA fail is prudent, how would we know when it has failed? Well, it won’t be when the insurers all leave “the market,” because there is no national insurance market (that’s the first problem). Rather, there are at least 50 health insurance markets: Health insurance is jointly regulated by the federal and state governments. Essentially, each state has a marketplace that insurers can join to offer insurance plans that comply with the ACA’s requirements and thus qualify for federal subsidies based on the purchaser’s family income.

Under the ACA, these plans must be priced according to a community rating system. In a nutshell, community rating systems limit the set of factors that can be used by the insurance company when setting the price of the plan. For example, the price can depend on your age, whether you smoke, and where you live (referred to as your “geographical rating area”). These geographical distinctions are central to the debate about whether the ACA is collapsing.

What you can buy depends on where you live. Over the past two years, some insurers have been pulling out of insurance marketplaces, including in selective ways (i.e., dropping coverage of certain rating areas). A recent report by Avalere documents this, including this very helpful figure:

As the figure makes clear, an increasingly large number of counties have little or no competition on their state exchange. Many of these counties are sparsely populated and have few people participating on their state exchange, making the offering of a profitable plan under a community rating system more difficult.

The figure also demonstrates the complication of determining when the ACA has “failed”: Every state will have a different experience as time progresses. And on that point, compare two (among many) narratives about the cost of health insurance. (The figures below are drawn from this 2016 report by the McKinsey Center for US Health System Reform.) On the one hand, average premiums are increasing. The figure below demonstrates that in each tier of coverage, more than half of counties are seeing the cheapest premium increase by around 25 to 30 percent.

On the other hand, the next figure (also drawn from the McKinsey Center report linked above) demonstrates that there is significant county- and state-level variation in the direction of health insurance costs across the nation. There are several differences between the data in the median cost figure above and the county-level change figure below.

Perhaps the subtlest of these is that the median cost figure is reporting gross premiums, whereas the figure below is reporting net premiums — which takes into account the federal subsidy, which is based on an individual’s family income. Thus, the county-level figure below is illustrating (at least) two types of heterogeneity in the US “national health insurance market”: Demographics such as age, race, and family size vary widely across different counties, and so does income.

This second variation is particularly salient in the recent debates about replacing the ACA and, in particular, reforming Medicaid. The variation in the county-level maps also partially illustrate why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is having such a hard time crafting a repeal and/or replacement of the ACA. Simply put, how the ACA is performing depends on who you are and where you live.

So what now? It is of course highly unlikely that the health care debate will die away, but the experience of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that even sustained attention is not sufficient to avert policy failure. According to the congressional committee, a fundamental failure in the response to Katrina was informational: There was too little coordination of policymaking during the preparation for Katrina’s landfall. The analogy with health care reform is the need for clear discussion and preparation of benchmarks by which to judge the “national health insurance market.”

Without such a discussion, it is not only highly likely that we won’t have agreement on when to reform it but also very likely that we will continue to disagree in fundamental ways about how to reform it.

Every GOP senator wants something other than the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”), but, at least for now, not enough of them agree on what should supplant it. The political science of this situation is classic: The simple reality is that — in spite of the ACA’s unpopularity — the GOP can’t find anything to beat it. 

We have many options on the table, but let’s consider only four (here’s a nice description of the basics). First, there is the status quo (do nothing, leave the ACA in place). Second, weaken the ACA by allowing insurers to deny coverage to those with existing conditions and/or offer less comprehensive coverage. Third, weaken the ACA as in the third option and roll back Medicaid coverage over the next decade by supplanting the current entitlement formula with a capped block grant approach. (If this seems confusing, don’t worry: The idea is simply to cap the total expenditures and “grant more power to states,” which is disingenuous, because states essentially already have total discretion with respect to Medicaid.)

And fourth, and most recently, repeal the ACA with a transition period of two years, after which we either go back to something like the 2009 system or replace it in the next two years. (Yeah, like that’s going to go better than the current perverted puppet show.)

Okay, let’s set the first (leaving the ACA in place) to the side for a moment and consider the other three. 

The second option. The second option is not appealing to the right wing of the GOP caucus, because it doesn’t go far enough to repeal the ACA. (For example, the Senate version of the bill would not allow insurers to charge sick people more, i.e., it would retain a “community rating” requirement.) Because of the lack of support from the right wing of the GOP, this proposal can’t beat option 1 (“leave the ACA in place”).

The third option. The third option essentially takes the second option and ratchets back Medicaid, in an obvious ploy to capture the support of those on the right wing of the GOP such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). The quid pro quo here is: “We can’t rip the (electorally and Trumpically) desirable mandated features of the ACA to shreds, so how about we ‘shrink government’ by fundamentally altering (with no discussion or cogitation) a 50-year-old government program that resides at the heart of the health care system?”

This option loses GOP senators from many states — including Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — because it drastically cuts a substantial benefit for many of their constituents. (It didn’t help that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell apparently stated that the whole Medicaid stratagem is a lie.) So, once again, this proposal falls short of 50 votes.

The fourth option: repeal and pray for rain. The final option, “straight repeal” (which is much less straightforward under reconciliation than one might have imagined from the language used) was an obvious Hail Mary from McConnell, who knew he lacked the votes (and was probably just sticking it to President Trump). For example, consider Collins’s comment on Tuesday: “I voted against this approach in 2015, and I do not think that it is going to be constructive to repeal a law that at this point that is so interwoven within our health-care system and then hope that over the next two years we will come up with some kind of replacement.”

So option 4 is also now — like options 2 and 3, described above — dead in the water.  What’s the price, what’s the strategy?

Come up with something real.  The reality is that Obamacare is the Senate majority–preferred health care policy for now. A majority of citizens prefer it to any policy change that is on the table. The GOP is now stuck between a rock and a hard place of its own making. One could “fix” the ACA with additional taxes and/or a more single-payer system, but the reality is that the proposals for replacement all lean on moving further away from a single-payer system (mostly by cutting Medicaid) in order to pay for “reforms” of the system.  These payments are required (in terms of budget balance under reconciliation) because they are aimed at reducing either (or both) the tax “burden” of the ACA on the wealthy or the “burden” or adverse selection on insurers.

The simple math is that one can reduce the cost of ACA in either or both of two ways:

1. Relax the requirement that insurers cover preexisting conditions/impose no lifetime cap (for which ACA essentially insures them against the cost of doing so)
2. Stop paying for expanded government coverage for the less well off (i.e., Medicaid)

Neither of these are winners (and the GOP should stop politicizing the Congressional Budget Office: It does hard work under short timelines, and its numbers tend to help both parties in equal proportions).

While “getting government under control” sells seats, the reality is that all Americans want health care and most need some insurance to guarantee that health care will be available when they need it (typically when they are old and/or ill). 

But what about tax reform?  A significant proportion of the opposition to the ACA is based on finances — the ACA imposes both direct and indirect costs on the nation in pursuit of (quite possibly profitable) improvements in health care in the US. But a dollar in the hand is worth way more than two in the bush, so it’s simple silly to suggest that the debate about ACA repeal and replacement is independent of taxes. That said…

In the end, this isn’t a fracture between the moderates and the Tea Party within the GOP — it’s a simple reality: People want to have their cake and eat it too. The job of our representatives in this case is unenviable: They have to choose for us.

In the end, I bet they will choose the cake (health care) rather than eating it (taxes). I could be wrong, but human interest stories of old and sick people without care resonate more than those of well-off citizens who, because of their tax “burden,” have to hope for an upgrade on their semiannual trip to St. Maarten rather than just buying the first-class tickets to begin with.

Majority Leader McConnell has his work cut out for him. First step: reconstitute the majority.