Month: March 2021

A conversation I had a few minutes ago reminds me of something I failed to write about last week: the dire shape of the 2020 census. A combination of COVID-19 and massive mismanagement by the Trumpies has caused long delays in delivering results of the census to the states. In particular, the data needed to perform redistricting won't be available until September 30, which is six months late:

The delay puts states with early primaries and redistricting deadlines in a difficult position. At least nine states have constitutional or statutory deadlines to redraw their maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, that won’t mesh with such a profound delay in the data delivery.

....The time crunch will hit every state, but it’s particularly acute in states like Colorado with hard deadlines. Colorado’s state constitution requires new congressional maps to be drawn by Sept. 1. The commission is not fully formed yet, but Shipley said her staff is considering its options, including proposing legislation or turning to the state judiciary for a delay. “The other option is, I guess, to wait and get sued because we don’t meet our deadlines, and see what court weighs in at that point,” she said.

...."I am concerned that it's going to increase the volume of litigation," said Jason Torchinsky, an attorney with the NRRT who gamed out potential scenarios stemming from the census delays, including a proliferation of court-drawn interim maps. "So we could wind up with a series of court-drawn maps around the country for 2022, only to have legislatures reconvene to draw new maps for 2024."

What will this mean? Maybe nothing. Then again, I don't suppose that even the September 30 date is cast in stone. What happens if it becomes November 30? Or December 30?

In any case, the end result of the Trump administration's mismanagement is going to be a certain amount of extra chaos surrounding the redistricting process, which could end up delaying all the juicy gerrymandering that red states are looking forward to. Wouldn't that be a shame?

Here's the latest from the Golden State:

California’s state budget, already poised to be flush with higher-than-expected tax revenues, will receive an additional cash infusion of $26 billion under the COVID-19 relief bill that President Biden is expected to sign this week, sparking demands for a wide array of new efforts to help those hit hardest by the pandemic.

I predict that this will spark at least a week's worth of outrage on Fox News. And who knows? Maybe it's justified.

As for me, I guess I'll be happy as long as none of this money is used to fund the bullet train to nowhere. My fingers are crossed.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 10. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

HR1, the massive voting rights bill supported by Democrats, has no chance of passing in the Senate. Republicans will filibuster it, and Democrats don't have the votes to eliminate the filibuster.

However, over at my old home, Ari Berman reports that Stacey Abrams has an idea about the filibuster:

Abrams proposes tweaking it to allow major voting rights legislation to pass, and she thinks her plan can get reluctant Democrats on board.  In the same way that Democrats can pass budget bills and confirm judges and Cabinet members with a simple majority, legislation protecting voting rights should also be exempt from the 60-vote requirement, Abrams says.

“The judicial appointment exception, the Cabinet appointment exception, the budget reconciliation exception, are all grounded in this idea that these are constitutionally prescribed responsibilities that should not be thwarted by minority imposition,” she says. “And we should add to it the right to protect democracy. It is a foundational principle in our country. And it is an explicit role and responsibility accorded only to Congress in the elections clause in the Constitution.”

Put aside the fact that there are plenty of other exceptions to the filibuster rule, and almost none of them have been put in place merely because they affect "constitutionally prescribed responsibilities." They've mostly been put in place either out of pique or just because the Senate felt like it.

The bigger issue here is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to "eliminate" the filibuster. To explain what I mean, here's the process by which, for example, judges were exempted from the filibuster:

1. In 2013, Republicans filibustered three Democratic nominations to the DC Circuit Court and said that they would filibuster anyone else too. This pissed off the Democrats.
2. On October 31, Harry Reid moved to reconsider the vote to end debate (i.e., end the filibuster) on one of the judges, Patricia Millett.
3. The motion failed to get 60 votes to pass, which meant that debate remained open and Reid could not move on to a confirmation vote for Millett.
4. Reid raised a point of order, claiming that only a majority was required to cut off debate for appeals judges.
5. The presiding officer ruled that Reid was wrong.
6. Reid appealed the ruling.
7. It requires a majority of senators to sustain a parliamentary ruling, and this one failed, 48-52, with all Republicans voting to sustain and nearly all Democrats voting not to.
8. The presiding officer announced that because his ruling hadn't been sustained, there was now a new rule in place that required only a majority vote to invoke cloture on appellate judges and proceed to a confirmation vote.

Do you see what happened? There is no "filibuster rule" to be "eliminated." The majority party in the Senate can pass any bill it wants at any time with nothing more than a majority vote. To the extent that there's any "rule," it's merely an unspoken agreement not to pass bills by majority vote as long as the other guys don't do it first.

So sure, if they can rustle up 50 senators then Democrats can pass HR1 by majority vote and say that they intend to do it just this once and only for voting-rights bills, but that's meaningless. No matter what they say, Republicans aren't required to buy it. And they won't. Once Democrats have done it a single time, Republicans will feel free to pass any legislation they feel like with no more than a majority vote.

This is what happened with judges. Reid's motion applied only to appellate judges, but that was hardly binding. When Republicans took over the Senate, Mitch McConnell immediately followed Reid's precedent and nuked the filibuster for Supreme Court justices too.

In the end, the mighty filibuster, the scourge of American governance for so many decades, was little more than one of those emperor-has-no-clothes things. As soon as a single person pointed out the truth, everyone blinked and suddenly realized that there had never been anything there in the first place. The majority party had always had the ability to pass anything it wanted with 51 votes. It took nothing more than the will to do it and the recognition that the other party could do it too. Far from requiring a nuclear option, it turns out that ending the filibuster required only the faintest breath to make it vanish in the breeze like a dried out dandelion.

As we all know, the two centerpieces of the $1.9 billion rescue bill are checks for everyone and bonus payments for those collecting unemployment benefits. However, the bill has lots of other things in it, all of them aimed at specific groups. For example:

• People with kids ($120 billion in child tax credits)
• People using Obamacare ($34 billion in increased subsidies)
• Airline employees ($58 billion bailout means that furloughs were avoided)
• Food service workers ($25 billion in grants to restaurants)
• Organized labor ($86 billion bailout of failing union pension funds)
• Teachers ($130 billion to help schools reopen)
• Veterans ($20 billion for veterans' healthcare)

If your goal is to stimulate the economy, it doesn't matter all that much where the money goes. You just want to get money into the economy quickly. This leaves plenty of room to make sure that you spread the benefits around so that you have lots of grateful registered voters when the next election rolls around.

That's how this bill works. It accomplishes three things. First, it spends lots of money so that the economy will be humming when the 2022 elections are held. Second, it provides lots of money for programs specific to COVID-19 recovery. This will ensure that the pandemic is long past by next November. Third, it provides big, targeted benefits to specific groups who can be reminded of them during campaign season.

Will it work? Who knows. But its goal is very clearly to do well by doing good—and in this case, "well" means increasing the Democratic majority in the next Congress. From my perch it sure looks like it's primed to succeed.

This radio telescope is part of the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of ten telescopes throughout the United States that can make observations at very short wavelengths (approximately in the range of 3 millimeters to 900 millimeters). It's right next to the Owens Valley Radio Observatory run by Caltech, which consists of about a dozen radio telescopes of various sizes.

When I took this picture I was careful to frame it so I'd include the mountains in the background. However, it wasn't until I got home that I realized just how striking those mountains were. If you told me this picture was taken in the high Andes I think I'd believe you.

Over at Politico, Sam Stein warns that the big Democratic stimulus bill might not do Democrats any good:

That was the conclusion of a trio of political scientists after examining the electoral ripples of the Obama stimulus seven years after it passed. Katherine Levine Einstein of Boston University, Kris‐Stella Trump of the University of Memphis and Vanessa Williamson of Brookings looked at the political fallout of that bill and concluded that it was, in fact, “null” — overwhelmed by the massive tides of party polarization.

....“This finding suggests that highly politicized spending can actually be counterproductive for an incumbent Democrat,” the study read. “Rather than being ‘unresponsive,’ conservative counties punished Democrats for the spending they received from the stimulus.”

Generally speaking, I agree that individuals are unlikely to remember the bennies they got from this bill for more than the few months that seem to be the extent of the average American's attention span. But that's not the right way to look at the political consequences of the stimulus.

First and foremost, the effect of the American Rescue Act will be to stimulate the economy. The effects of this will fade out in 2022, but they won't fade out completely. The result will be strong recovery from the pandemic in 2021 followed by solid growth throughout 2022—as you can see in the latest forecast from Goldman Sachs. That makes for a happy electorate, which in turn helps the governing party.

Second, the bennies from this bill extend beyond this year. Will anyone remember the $1,400 checks? Maybe not. But how about the big child tax credit? Or the big subsidy increase for Obamacare? Those are things that lots of registered voters will take advantage of in early 2022, precisely when you want everyone to be happy and contented with how the majority party is running things.

Obviously, this only makes a difference if Democrats loudly and continuously predict boom times for the next 18 months so that everyone knows exactly who deserves the credit for this utopian paradise they're living in.

It also depends on what else is happening in the world in the summer of 2022, but there's nothing anyone can do about that. For now, keeping the economy humming and making sure that people know who to credit for it—that's the ticket for political victory. So far it seems to be going pretty well.

Inflation figures for February are out. Should we be worried?

There are different ways of viewing inflation, but I prefer looking at the annual change. Headline CPI, the number you see in the headlines, clocked in 1.7% above its level last February, so there's nothing much to be concerned about there. It's true that it's been climbing for a while, but this is mostly to recover from its plunge at the start of the pandemic last year.

The metric that the Fed is more interested in is core inflation, which doesn't include volatile food and energy prices. Core CPI is at 1.3% and is actually declining a bit.

In other words, there's nothing to be concerned about here. That makes this a pretty good baseline to gauge whether big stimulus spending sparks a round of high inflation. Come back in a year for the answer.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 9. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Passage of the American Rescue Plan will be a great win for President Biden and for progressives in general. However, everyone realizes that this is it, right? There might be another reconciliation bill later in the year, but aside from that Republicans will not allow anything more to pass and Democrats will not be able to eliminate the filibuster.

It doesn't matter how important something is or how strongly we fight for it. It just doesn't matter. So please, no stories about the "difficult path ahead" or any of that nonsense. Nothing more will pass. Nothing. And we all know why.

(There's a limited amount Biden can do with executive orders and things like tariffs that are under the control of the executive. But that's mostly small potatoes.)