The Green Lantern Theory Of Congress And St. Elsewhere

With the shutdown in full swing now is a great time to look back at Matt Yglesias's old idea of the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. Yglesias coined the idea back in the Bush days to point out the absurdity of the conservative claim that the only thing limiting America in foreign policy was a lack of willpower. In 2009, political scientist Brendan Nyhan pointed out an emerging liberal Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency where Obama could get things like a public option or a much bigger stimulus if only he tried harder. Both cases where of course widely off the mark about how the world works and what is in fact possible.

House Republicans seem to have created a Green Lantern Theory of their own in recent years. Call it the Green Lantern Theory of Congress. Under this theory Congress can force Obama to agree to gut his own healthcare bill and do all sorts of other things as well, as long as they demonstrate a sufficiently strong iron will. Alas this theory doesn't seem to be doing any better in the real world than Bush's one about the Middle East. 




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Over at the good men project I talked about how shutting down the government is a goldmine for some conservatives, how the "New Hillary" is turning into the same "Old Hillary" (at least in the press's eyes) of yesteryear, and weighed in on the ongoing food stamp wars.

If An Idea Dies In Congress, Does It Make A Sound?

The other day conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a good blog post about the problems facing the GOP when it comes to health care policy.  Douthat argues that while there are conservative ideas about how to make the American health care system work better, the problem is that these ideas exist in think tank land and never actually make it to Congress, the place where health care policy is set:

This, this, is the Republican Party’s health care problem. It isn’t that conservative ideas about health policy don’t exist, and it isn’t that they won’t work. It’s that right now the feasibility question is purely academic, because even after five years of debating these issues, and despite Eric Cantor’s best efforts, there still aren’t enough Republican lawmakers willing to take even the smallest of steps toward putting those ideas to the test. This means that no matter how much of a “bureaucratic nightmare” the implementation of the current health care law turns out to be, liberals at least have this ace in the hole: When it comes to health care reform, there is still no politically realistic alternative to their approach.

I'd agree that the GOP certainly has a "policy problem," but I'd argue if anything the situation is worse than how Douthat characterizes it.

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently pointed out at Salon that GOP legislators just don't seem to care about policy outcomes at all.  In the House of Representatives the GOP has only filled one of the 10 traditional slots reserved for high profile bills:

Which leads to the embarrassing fact that no one seems to have noticed about this year’s House Republicans. Over 100 days into the current Congress, their agenda is … almost completely empty.

In fact, of the 10 reserved slots, there’s only one bill filed. That’s H.R. 3, a bill to force the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. Even that is pretty minimal – it’s far more of a symbolic position than it is an energy policy. And even that took until March 15 to introduce.

This isn't because Republican voters or conservtatives in general don't care about public policy, they do!  It's because the incentives inside the GOP have become so perverse, that doing the hard work of actually writing a bill will get you nowhere:

My guess is that the Republican-aligned partisan press is just so easy for Republican politicians that they’ve all become lazy. If all you have to do to be a favorite guest on Fox News or on syndicated conservative talk radio is to mutter something vague about Benghazi and make a teleprompter joke, what’s the incentive of doing the hard work of actually writing a bill?

Indeed, Ted Cruz has been making hay by introducing nothing and instead claiming responsibility for things he had nothing to do with.

While it's true that some conservative intellectuals and think tankers have been kicking around ideas for how to change America's health care system, I'd argue at best this is only a symbolic victory for folks (like Douthat) who want to see a more functional GOP.  The fact that some people get paid to churn out white papers at Cato or Heritage just doesn't count for much when the reality in the GOP Congress is that no one cares about policy.  Which is why I predict that we will see more and more symbolic votes on things like "repealing Obamacare" and nothing when it comes to the "replace" side of the slogan we've been hearing for four years now.

Can We Just Acknowledge This is the Worst Congress Ever?

The Holier Than Thous in Congress that head up the House Committee for Government Reform and Oversight have declared war on the city of Saint Paul Minnesota and are demanding a massive probe into some slum lords that got shut down under Mayor Randy Kelly (who isn't the mayor anymore) back in 2002. I kid you not. Can we just acknowledge that this is the worst Congress ever? John Slides over at Monkey Cage recently had a graph that showed this Congress has passed fewer bills than any since, well the 1880's (again I kid you not). Oh and 20% of those bills were about renaming post offices and plazas...oh, they also passed a bill to order the United States Mint to mint commemorative baseball coins to help fund the Baseball Hall of Fame, but alas, that bill died in committee in the Senate. Recently the independent investigation of that whole "Fast and Furious" thing came out that showed that Holder was completely in the clear, and the whole "investigation" by Congress was pretty much a joke. Basically some guys in a ATF field office employed some highly dubious investigative strategies with bad results, but no, the Attorney General was not aware of this (there are over 14,000 swore FBI agents in the country, and thousands more of civilian personnel, no the Attorney General is not aware of everything they do every day and that's just one agency he oversees) and didn't do anything wrong. So the whole thing was basically an absurd show trial joke. And now Congress is demanding the City of Saint Paul pony up 180 million smackers, and why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Essentially the City decided not to take a case to the supreme court after the NAACP and a whole lot of other people like former Vice President Walter Mondale said that this Supreme Court could use slum lords getting shut down as a a legal pretense to gut all fair housing legislation passed in the last 40 years. So the City of Saint Paul decided not to risk the role of the dice in front of Tony Scalia and that means they obstructed justice, and that means they need to pay 180 million dollars. And why? Well because of discrimination against poor slum lords or something. And stuff. And Obama is a socialist. Because Congress said so.


Worst Congress Ever.