Or, more pointedly, start to adjust your strategy for engaging with this campaign accordingly. Matt's been catching a lot of shit on Twitter for his doomerism stance, but Biden's been behind for *months* in most polls. Swing state races look especially grim. Behind in Nevada. NH is in play. Maybe even Minnesota. Etc. If Trump's lead widens much more AND Democrats abandon ticket reset effort, emphasis will start to shift to protecting down ticket races. That's the cold reality.
The biggest problem is we are working in an uncertain information environment. The accuracy of polls is hard to measure.
I don’t think replacing Biden will change the malaise and ill defined discontent many people feel. I also don’t see how changing who governs resolves any of the supposed problems the country faces.
Polling analysis is challenging, agreed! But not impossible. I've read enough to be convinced Joe Biden's chances are very weak. The question of how Democrats would fare with a different ticket is the "uncertain information" bit. I personally believe the answer is "better." We'll never know for sure (even if Harris-Pritzker beat Trump-Vance, we'll still be unable to visit the universe where Biden-Harris was the ticket. So you can never be *sure* what's what).
>I also don’t see how changing who governs resolves any of the supposed problems the country faces.<
I think Democratic Party governance can't solve all of our problems. But implying it can't solve *any* of them seems wrong. And from my perspective governance by the party of FDR is a lot less likely to create terrible *new* problems (Withdrawal from NATO? Trade War on steroids? Sabotage of safety net programs? War with Iran? Pushing the judiciary even further to the right? Cutting off Ukraine? Climate change denialism? Massive increase in deficit?). I also, needless to say, don't think a serious assault on our constitution is implausible.
My second comment was in reference to voters handing things to Republicans, not a different Democratic administration (which would be effectively status quo.)
I just think we are operating in a black box and replacing Biden would result in a weaker Democratic position than if Biden remained. (Lots of the wishcasters understate how damaging it would be for the person replacing Biden and all the negative media spin.)
The risk for congressional Dems might be marginal voters becoming so meh to Biden, even ones that can't stand Trump, that they stay home, depriving congressional Dems of coattails.
Dems need to put the ”stop Trump from gaining a super majority and controlling all branches of government plus the SC” message front and center now that it’s clear Biden will lose. Even many people who will vote for Trump might want to have some checks and balances.
If voters are most concerned about cost of living, Trump + Dem Congress could be a worse situation than Biden + GOP Congress when it comes to deficit reduction and thus freeing up Fed on interest rates a bit more.
Polymarket has the odds of a GOP sweep at 54%. And Biden is now more likely than not to lose the national POPULAR vote for the first time since that contract started. Even a fair bit of split ticket voting may not save the Dems in the house at this point, and the Senate map is terrible for the Dems.
What are the chances we get good policy outcomes from the present batch of craven cowards inhabiting the Democratic benches in Congress? Maybe it’s better to heighten the contradictions and get politicians with the balls to win.
I don't think these ordinary policy questions are reason enough to vote for an empty chair or blank check for President. The only thing that can justify that is concern about a serious even if low-probability threat to democracy.
For example, many of these federal safety net programs could stand to be rethought and redesigned. A real debate over that in itself isn't something to fear to shy away from. The problem is that, on their own, Democrats won't do it. And on their own, Republicans will do it badly.
So, if we're setting aside democracy concerns for a moment, the key to all of this -- whether it's an opportunity for good changes or just bad ones -- seems to be whether Democrats keep enough seats in Congress to keep a seat at the negotiating table. And then assuming they have leverage, whether they use it well.
For example, if funding is kept constant, what exactly is the problem with changing Medicaid to a block grant program, and letting states do more experimentation to find better ways of funding healthcare for those of limited means? There are many ways to skin that cat, and the way Medicaid currently does is just one way, by no means the only or best way. But Democrats treat even the mention of change as a threat to be demonized, and Republicans just want to slash and burn. And so nothing productive ever advances, just stasis and political trench warfare nobody is happy and neither side is able to break out of a status quo that everyone seems to agree isn't that great.
Fixed block based funding for medicaid would allow less flexibility for program expansion and give red state governors the ability to make program cuts. Basically every think tank in Washington, from center-right to the left, thinks it's a surefire way to take health care away from lower-income Americans.
Also, even with Biden's current state, he's clearly not an empty chair or blank check.
It seems reasonable to think that, even if he’s not an empty chair now, Biden may be by 2028. And I don’t have confidence in those around him to remove him from office in the event that he significantly deteriorates to the point where he clearly can’t do the job.
Probably not, but it's a very interesting question. Housing is generally much less affordable in blue states, and if you're poor enough for medicaid to matter to you then you a move to NJ or California might leave you homeless.
This also seems like a questionable way of assessing the likely policy outcomes of a Republican trifecta.
What if someone had analyzed the likely outcomes of a Democratic trifecta in 2020 like this? Going off of the party’s platform and members’ stated policy goals, you would’ve thought we’d maybe get a massive change in the “care economy”, a Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and an overhaul of the healthcare system, at the very least.
But understanding the messy nature of congressional policy making (plus all the trifecta-proof veto points), it was utterly predictable that the outcome would be factional infighting leading to a hodgepodge of spending that typical voters don’t have the expertise to understand.
Similarly, with Republicans my guess is that once again factional infighting and internal ideological disagreements will lead to much less substantive policy progress than what, say, McConnell would hope for. Is Trump better able to control intrafactional infighting than Biden? I doubt it.
One of the things that makes the Republican trifecta significantly more daunting than the democratic trifecta is the way big ticket republican priorities fit into reconciliation and big ticket lefty ones don’t.
Like you could zero out most spending on the poor and let people starve to death on the streets with 50 senators but you can’t change almost anything that isn’t moving money around.
A quibble with this line of reasoning: a simple, bare trifecta with the minimum possible of majorities has the features you describe. But a trifecta within the reach of Republicans presently doesn’t. A minority in the House effectively has no power whatsoever. They can’t even shape debate effectively due to the way the House structures committees and controls votes. The Senate is a little different, but a 3-4 Senator majority basically makes every moderate Republican vote irrelevant if Republicans are willing to make their agenda work through simple majorities (either through reconciliation or by nuking the filibuster).
I think the Republicans probably correctly see the filibuster as more beneficial to them than not. They've also shown time and time again that they prefer (illegal) immigration as an issue to actually doing something about it. Absent super majority I think chances of big time legislation are low. Only then will they have no choice but to pass things. Instead we will have tax and program cuts through reconciliation, executive action, and more federalist society judges. Aka repeat of Trump 1.
I think you're discounting the sense of hubris that a huge victory would imbue them with. To say they'll think they're on a mission from the Almighty may not be that much of a stretch.
I mean, shoot, even the Democrats coming in with the tiniest majority possible in 2021 thought they were the reincarnation of the 1933 FDR majority.
1) Most Republican policy goals can be adopted through reconciliation and don’t require a supermajority even under the current filibuster rules.
2) I don’t believe a Republican Senate would resist demands by President Trump to eliminate the filibuster for significant legislation. There are only a couple Republican Senators that could be confident in surviving a Trump backed primary challenge.
3) I think a 4-6 Senator lead will cause Republicans to be confident in holding the majority of the Senate for a long time. Whether that confidence would be misplaced is debatable, but there’s little doubt the map heavily favors Republicans presently.
Unclear though how they will react to “big time legislation” endorsed by Trump—if they owe him their seats, why wouldn’t they go for it? This is looking like a one-man party, men like that tend to get their way.
I suspect this is less and less likely to be that big a deal. Trump is old, and, like, look, we aren't going back to 2019. Presidents don't have a lot of control over the macroeconomic situation, and Trump benefitted from that in 2016-2019 and today will have either inflation or high interest rates no matter what he does (which will rapidly degrade his popularity among people who currently remember 2019 and imagine that reelecting Trump will reproduce 2019). And of course he can't run in 2028.
I think all of that empowers Congressional Republicans to not care THAT much about what he wants. I mean, don't get me wrong, he'll still be President, he'll still have influence, but I don't think he'll have as much power as you're imagining.
They will get immigration as an issue by doing huge, constitutional-boundary-pushing enforcement acton in front of the cameras and letting everyone react.
I think what you are describing is "the system working". Winning elections requires papering over disagreements that then burst into the open when trying to govern. For Republicans, that disagreement is over reproductive rights.
There is clearly a large faction of Republicans who see Trump as a vehicle for their goals of fetal personhood, banning birth control, etc. And they are becoming louder as a second Trump term comes into focus. "Leave it up to the states" might work for the campaign, but not once they take power. When that fight breaks out in public, it is likely to be paralytic to legislating and electoral poison for Republicans. I can easily picture the "we have to blow up the filibusterer to protect unborn life" faction butting heads with the "imagine what Democrats will do with that power in the future" McConnell faction.
Remember the courts. Remember Chevron being overturned.
The greatest trick Mitch McConnell ever pulled, was hiding the football with GOP economic platform and having it shadow enacted in the courts. The culture war stuff unfortunately distracts from the fact that courts are where most of the GOP donor class platform (outside of tax cuts) will get passed.
Arguably it is. The GOP wants the federal bureaucracy to have less power to regulate business, and they want lawsuits against regulation to be more likely to succeed. Overturning Chevron achieves that.
I am not a scholar but I am an attorney in the federal govt who works on rulemakings. I have seen the hot takes that the end of Chevron may occasionally cause headaches for conservatives attempting regulatory rollbacks. And, sure, it could happen and probably will in at least a few instances.*
But there is a reason the conservative legal movement has been pursuing this for decades and a reason the conservative Justices have been licking their chops to water down, weaken, and ultimately abrogate any deference enjoyed by executive agencies. It forces agencies to engage in activity only expressly within their statutory mandates. That means fewer industries that can be regulated, fewer transactions that can be regulated, less conduct that can be regulated, etc. Because when the administrative state is built upon statutes that are mostly from the Big Government era of ~1936 to ~1976, there is a lot of ambiguity as to what modern conduct is reached by those statutes. The times change, businesses evolve, and labels that once squarely applied no longer do. Chevron allowed agencies to operate in those gray areas, which almost necessarily grew as statutes aged. Regulation of those gray areas will now be extremely difficult. And agency heads are often risk-averse (except I suppose some of the Warrenite ones) so they try to avoid the embarrassment of a regulatory effort being wasted on a gray area.
Maybe regulation is bad! I've certainly seen that. And yes, I get the argument that Congress can always pass a new law if courts prevent executive agencies from carrying out a law in line with Congress's intent. But the idea that the end of Chevron was a mixed basket for the Right... I do not see it that way, from my limited but relevant vantage point.
*I mainly see Chevron as presenting risk for regulatory rollbacks where a statute *requires* an agency to engage in certain regulation. So, in theory, the end of Chevron could make it harder for agencies to avoid that statutory mandate. But, in my experience, there are far more statutes that *empower* agencies to regulate certain conduct. And even the statutory mandates usually empower agencies to create exception and exemptions, so... in summation: the loss of leeway to regulate is greater than the loss of leeway to deregulate.
Only a few regulations are bad, but those are doozies. The test of whether ending Chevron deference will be worth it is whether expansive megaprojects become dirt cheap next year bc of no need for bullshit environmental impact statements.
We won't know the balance of things for years - but I'm deeply skeptical that overturning Chevron is going to have a measurable impact for several reasons.
a) The grey areas that you are highlighting is covered under major questions doctrine not Chevron, so isn't implicated at all.
b) Just because a statue is ambiguous doesn't mean that a court will never agree with the agency.
c) The judiciary, for all practical purposes, is split ideologically with very, very few cases ever reaching SCOTUS.
I think it'll probably end up somewhere in between what you and TR are saying. It all comes down to getting lower level courts to bite on what interpretation they're going for, and then for enough justices on SCOTUS to not see it as an absurd interpretation.
EDIT: and to your second sentence, that's one of the mysteries that will need to be answered. Will SCOTUS be even handed in being more active in determining ambiguous language, or will Alito style hackery win out the day and they'll only pick on Democratic administrations?
Yeah, I mean, the original Chevron decision was about allowing Reagan’s EPA to relax environmental regulations without interference from the courts. But I do think TR is right about where the GOP's head is at right now.
Yes, and the only chance of that being stopped is having a Democratic president and Senate majority. Unfortunately, it seems like Matt has given up on even trying to hold the Presidency. But it's worth noting that even if Democrats somehow win back the House, Trump and a Republican Senate can maintain a 6-3 majority or even expand the majority, in addition to adding judges in other courts.
I know it's difficult to assess the policy implications of the Court, but seems like something Matt should consider doing some time between now and November.
Honestly I would trust most red states to figure out the best way to handle their own poverty issues over most 1-size-fits-all federal government programs. Big blue states struggling with homelessness and overburdened tax systems seem to be farther away from solving their own problems.
First because I'm pretty sure we're talking about GOP vs Dem controlled states and not the Old Confederacy. Otherwise, yes, Virginia's HDI does kick ass, but West Virginia's does not, and you have to get into reasons for that which are not relevant.
But it's also just substantially a weak dodge. Many red areas (but not all) do a good job caring for their poorest, but they often go about it in very different ways. And many Blue areas (not all) are really struggling with certain social issues that are very rare in red areas. Is the "Old Confederacy" struggling with homelessness and drug addiction? Not nearly as much the liberal West Coast or Northeast. So I think we can safely say that Blue states haven't figured out the answer to every question.
Wrt poverty the question is which levels of government are best situated to help. I don't think it's so crazy to think the answer could be the state-level or lower.
>First because I'm pretty sure we're talking about GOP vs Dem controlled states and not the Old Confederacy.<
Yes. You know perfectly well what I'm referring to. Thanks for the reveal. Also, I didn't talk about slicing and dicing that region: if we indeed look at the Old Confederacy, I'm quite confident HDI would be indeed be less than the national average, and quite a bit less than states outside that region controlled by Democrats. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama etc would swamp the one state that managed to join Blue America. This is broadly true if we're talking about poverty, life expectancy, obesity, highway safety, homicide, income, per capita GDP., and so on.
So yes, you'll have to forgive me for being squeamish about handing over large chunks of no-strings federal revenue to (MAGA-dominated) state government so utterly determined to hold back progress, and the development of their own people. It seems like it might on net be bad for both the people in question and America!
I sincerely don't, partly because I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Initially you mentioned Oklahoma, but now you seem to be angrily focused only on the old confederacy.
But anyhow - how did Virginia "join Blue America"? It did that by having it's population shift towards urbanized, educated professional due to their urbanized, high-paying areas. This is similar to Atlanta or the Research Triangle in NC or Florida or Houston or Dallas. The causality isn't "voted Blue and then the cities grew".
Rural areas the world over lag urban ones in development and lag in HDI...so what? West Virginia, Arkansas, and many Appalachian or Southern states were behind in all the metrics you mentioned when they were Blue states and now they are as red states. Again, so what? Forgive me for looking at how badly run Los Angeles or Chicago are and then sympathizing with those who wonder if Democrats' vision of progress will be the best thing for Alabama.
There’s plenty of poverty and homelessness in the old confederacy too. People just get jailed for vagrancy and drug possession, and housing is cheaper. There’s less money sloshing around the nonprofit sector to help the homeless, so nonprofits are often more efficient in the South. So yeah, fewer visible manifestations of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction - though I would encourage you to take a drive through South Memphis or North Memphis and ask if that’s worse or better than the encampments on the Left Coast; you might surprise yourself.
You can agree with these policies, thinking the Sourh does things right, and with some of them I even do, and some of them are just the consequences of a less is more touch, but they’re profoundly unrelated to the Medicaid block grant question! You are in fact arguing for state government cronies to embezzle the money!
If my tax dollars are going to Mississippi for supporting their poor, damned if I'm OK with giving local politicians there carte blanche about how my money is going to be spent.
In this twisted braid of a comment thread, who the hell knows. But it was kicked off with a comment about making Medicaid a fixed block grant to the states.
But should you be making those decisions for Mississippi and Oklahoma (unless you live in Mississippi or Oklahoma)? The whole point of federalism is that the federal government doesn't make every decision about how states run their affairs, including with regard to the economically disadvantaged.
I think if medicaid were a wholly state program I'd agree with you but in every state I know of the Feds pick up a lot of the bill. Giving them a bunch of money they can spend on unrelated things to balance their state budgets while poor residents don't get the meds they need is a federal concern.
I mean, do we really want to get into the historical reasons why too much deference to federalism or to put in maybe more accurate, states rights has been problematic?
And yes it applies here. It's not a mistake that the deep south has the stingiest social safety net in the country. I mean, I feel like this is sort of under the radar one of the ugliest scandals of the last few years. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/brett-favre-welfare-mississippi.html. It matters to me that a state government can be this callous to its most vulnerable citizens.
And this is one of the main ways we get Trumpism - the (accurate) perception of many that elites are telling them how to run their lives or their local governments.
I may agree with you about safety nets, but I live in NY, not Mississippi. And, jeez, have you ever seen how the NY state government is run? We're not really an examplar. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to quarrel with the probity of Mississippi state expenditures.
I would really take a look at Mississippi state governance. Read that welfare scandal again and then look at how stingy welfare benefits are in Mississippi including how onerous they make qualification. This is some real "sheriff of Nottingham" stuff.
NY gets a ton more press for some pretty obvious reasons...and a lot of valid (NYC somehow only discovering trash cans work is this Simpson clip come to life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZgtEdFAg3s). But this not actually mean that states with a lot less national press scrutiny are themselves paragons of good governance or good policy.
"I mean, do we really want to get into the historical reasons why too much deference to federalism or to put in maybe more accurate, states rights has been problematic?"
Too much of anything is a problem. Are you arguing that letting states decide poverty issues will lead directly to segregated water fountains? This is completely silly, and appealing to what is may be the poorest and most corrupt state in the union is pure cherry-picking. Should we take NM's many failures as the best reflection of Dem policies, also?
The fact that Mississippi is messing something up is not much of a reflection on what Georgia or Idaho is going to do. If it's red state politics than look into how Blue-run Jackson, MS, and other Dem areas of that state are doing.
I don't post this to say Jackson, MS shouldn't have done more, but talking about "blue cities" and "red states" when stuff like infrastructure is being discussed is a red herring.
Because claiming to care equally about everything and everyone everywhere, is virtually indistinguishable in practice from not caring much about anyone anywhere.
All else equal, your circle of empathy should largely overlap with your circle of efficacy. Otherwise you're spending a lot of time and energy thinking and getting upset about things that aren't in your control anyway.
A glib response that completely misses the point, or intentionally avoids it, as the case may be. Nobody who's not crazy thinks every issue in the vast country should be decided at the federal level, nor that every issue should be handled at the local or state level. There's a huge range for reasonable disagreement about what issues, at any given period, are best handled at what level. What made sense fifty years ago might not make sense or be the best that we can do today, or fifty years from today. And trying to shut down any discussion of that with glib dodges that either don't comprehend the issue or intentionally try to keep it from being discussed is not constructive.
I would say it's a recipe for #1) focusing more on local gov, which would be a great thing and #2) focusing your national attention on your local representatives in the national government
But I don't believe that block granting creates efficiency. If I make the leap towards wanting my tax dollars to pay for Medicaid in my own state, I don't really see how it's significantly complicated by making it federal. That hasn't been show of claimed in Zack's comment. The claim is about preferences, and yes, to me, treating these groups differently doesn't make any moral sense. I haven't seen any on efficiency grounds.
Not necessarily. This assumes Democrats outside those states have no leverage in the redesign or if they do, they don't use it well. And that the voters in Mississippi and Oklahoma have no say or don't care whether people in their state can't get medical care.
Conceptually I can sort of agree to the idea but then we look at how tanf funds are spent and it's not great. Giving states a lot of leeway to redesign medicaid seems genuinely dangerous to the health and wellbeing of its recipients.
An intelligent redesign of Medicaid would be worthwhile. The most recent expansion cost over $5 million per statistical life saved. That’s far more than it’s beneficiaries earn in a lifetime. Devoting over a lifetime of earnings to saving a life is pretty ridiculous.
I reject wretched safetyism and strongly disagree with the DOT bureaucrats. If you really value a life that much, you’ll squeeze out quite a bit of consumption for safety type stuff and rarely have any fun.
I don’t see your point. The only implication from your statements are that you think VSL should be tied to a person’s earnings and that a number lower than most government VSLs is too high.
Do you think India should adopt $13.2 million as their VSL? That would be absurd, they are too poor to do that. If they tried, they would have to adopt a western quality health care and sanitation system overnight, all other social goals would be deprioritized. There has to be a sensible discussion about how much of the economy ought to be given over to safety and how much to enjoyment.
“ Do you think India should adopt $13.2 million as their VSL?”
This is nowhere implied or suggested. The follow on statement also suggests that you haven’t read up on how VSL is constructed or used. You kind of sound like Thomas Friedman with that vague appeal to sensibility.
Do you or do you not believe the value of a person’s life is measured by the (market) income they generate? That is what you suggested in your initial statement.
As usual with GOP legislative policy, all rounds lead back to tax cuts. You're right in theory that an "intelligent design" of Medicaid could be good thing. But I have serious doubts that's what's going to happen based on what we know. Block granting Medicaid in the manner Paul Ryan would want (and seems to be what Project 2025 wants) would amount to massive decrease in Medicaid funding over time. Also, devil is in the details. How much of that block granting would likely result in gobs of money to be used towards churches. SCOTUS has already shown itself to be astonishingly deferential to church interests. A ruling noting that states are allowed to funnel Medicaid dollars to churches seems astonishingly likely to me.
Do you have the balls to tell Debbie no chemo for her breast cancer? I think you, like many voters, talk a good game but have no tolerance for actual implementation.
Chemo for breast cancer — especially if one was healthy before— is pretty high efficacy and not horribly costly. It would clear the bar of $500k/statistical life.
I totally have the balls to tell alcoholics no expensive treatments for cirrhosis.
No but there are other treatments. There are also really expensive procedures for the obese, for people with mobility issues who would be mobile if they had exercised, etc
Yes. For example, if you look at a list of the largest integrated health systems by revenue, #20 last year had revenue of $10.5 billion. Many of these are ostensibly nonprofit institutions. What are they doing for the poor to earn their nonprofit status? Not a lot.
They have high fixed costs and sometimes struggle with that, such as when demand and revenue dipped during the pandemic and then they were hit with inflation on top of that. On their own they could do a bit more. With different types of government programs and concentrated help, they could do a lot more, possibly better and more cost-effectively than the way Medicaid currently filters and disperses its money though the system. But none of those possibilities are easy or feasible to try when everything has to pass through the needle of a single agency veto point in Washington, and even broaching the subject brings down vicious knee jerk opposition from one party, for no clearly articulated reason except the perceived threat to the status quo.
Yeah, but we’ve talked about this in a previous thread. In a world with EMTALA, Medicaid doesn’t really save many lives because, well, EMTALA. Medicaid ensures doctors and hospitals get paid for the work they’re already doing, allows people to use preventative care and prescriptions (improved quality of life, but not really quantity, because the ER will still treat and stabilize them when they get sick either way), and prevents medical bankruptcy. Calculating the cost of Medicaid dividing by the marginal life saved with the program, given EMTALA, is designed specifically to make Medicaid look ineffective. Medicaid is plenty effective, that’s just the wrong metric.
I mean in the end no program saves lives, nobody makes it out alive!
One of Medicaid's big problems is wealthier states simply have the tax base to produce greater spending for matching grants. This is producing a lot of additional spending growth. Even when controlling for expansion states, this story plays out where we're getting federal spending transfers to richer states on net without a ton in the way of strictly anti-poverty policy to defend this.
MI's senior fellow Chris Pope has written an excellent piece on how to keep Medicaid focused on its key goals and ultimately set it on a path to federalize [1], and he has quite a bit in further research to back it up. Leaving it to the states is neither the most fiscally conservative nor most progressive anti-poverty approach. We already have enough of these shenanigans with TANF.
The ACA was in fact a very middle of the road strategy to tackle the problems with the way we fund and deliver healthcare in the United States and there is a lot that could be done to build on its success and improve its weaknesses but that requires two functioning parties and since 2008 we have had one party interested in governing and making incremental progress and one simply determined to block progress in order to gain power and cut taxes. I don’t know how deep the impacts of a GOP trifecta will be but I know that poor people will feel them the hardest and it makes me nauseous to watch those who claim to care about the most vulnerable simply shrug and look forward to reviving their resistance focused vibes.
Sigh. Part of this is the fault of the out of touch elitism of the Democratic Party. Part of this is the result of a moral failing of the American people.
People have childish expectations that things will be taken care of without cost and easily, and then ignore the promises made by those they empower.
"People have childish expectations that things will be taken care of without cost and easily"
I think people have a poor understanding of the Constitution, the governing document they purportedly hold in such high-esteem. The president is not a king and historically did not (and should not and was not even primarily designated to) have had much power to unilaterally enact any domestic agenda. I still, STILL have to have arguments with people who are unhappy about their tax bill and blame it on the president. And I still, STILL can't believe people think the president has any control over the economy, especially their tiny, sliver microcosm of the economy that they occupy.
I actually see a connection between this "expectation that things will be taken care of without cost and easily" view of politics and those who are deeply religious - especially in religions of the monotheistic variety. That is, of course, what the Abrahamic religions do well: simplify everything into one deity to which they can foist all their hopes and troubles on. It seems easy to see how if they ascribe this view to the nature of the universe, they think the governing of the country can be simplified in a similar way.
I find it especially perplexing that the world outside of the US doesn’t seem to exist to many Americans. Most Western countries have way worse inflation than the US, yet somehow inflation is Biden’s fault. Europeans are irrational in different ways but at least they don’t think that their leaders are omnipotent.
Fantastical policy agendas seem to me to be the original sin of a lot of modern authoritarianism. The specific variety of snake oil peddled varies across time and geography but whatever it is, when it doesn't work, the salesmen feel forced to look for scapegoats and/or attack the media to prevent it from reporting the disappointing reality, and then if/when that doesn't work, the constitutional order may be the next target.
You saw it in Britain with Brexit (supposedly obstructive judges labelled 'enemies of the people' for example) and you see it in Israel with the failures of its security policy covered up by attacks on the media, academia and protesters.
One reason my p(breakdown of American democracy) is higher than Matt's 10-15% is precisely because the Republican policy agenda doesn't add up. Matt himself has already argued that it leads inevitably to slow growth and high inflation.
So if they're successful in doing half of what they promise, the next Trump administration will quickly become very unpopular and Democratic wins in 2026/2028 will start to look highly likely.
Why should anyone be optimistic about how they'll handle that?
Nobody's policy agenda adds up right now, and it almost never has! Politicians get elected making promises they can't keep and then when the public figures that out, they boot them.
It's kind of interesting Matt has written the same article about three times and hasn't once listed what the Democratic party's realistic Congressional agenda is to reduce cost of living and address the deficit with a narrow majority. I'm not saying he shouldn't criticize Trump or Republicans, he absolutely has the right to do so, but it would be cool to know his predictions for what Democrats will pass and how it will avoid the errors of ARPA stimulus or get us to supply-side liberalism, etc.
He's made the point that Republicans are much more likely to have a trifecta and so its more relevant to talk about what they will do. Plus, its a lot easier to bash Republicans when you're a Democrat and its election time.
The expected value of a Republican trifecta is: The value of a R trifecta - the value of a D trifecta. If he never talks about the value of a D trifecta, then we can't know how bad an R tri actually is.
Say the Democratic party has a negative expected value of -5, and the Rs are -7. The actual difference between them is just 2.
The amount of revenue currently suggested via tax increases on the wealthy and the amount of revenue needed to pay for Biden/Democrats proposed spending is so disparate its hard to take much more seriously than Trump's proposal to pay for the federal budget with tariffs.
Plus, just as the DBCFT died with retail lobbying before it was ever included in the TCJA (suggesting the GOP is not eager for broad VAT-style consumption tax increases or tariffs that have similar incidence if not the same escalatory problem), the legislative record of 2021-2023 suggests Democrats do not have a coalition to increase upper bracket income taxes like Bill Clinton did. Doesn't matter how many times the White House proposes it!
Exactly right. If the GOP won't moderate on its draconian fiscal agenda, there ends up being a certain logic to an authoritarian power grab as the best way to square this circle.
To be fair, the ultra-Remainers also deserve a lot of the blame for Brexit going as badly as it did. They never had much of a strategy beyond refusing to believe that the Leave vote had really happened, and some of their own tactics (holding a second referendum to correct the results of the first one) were undemocratic too.
If Labour had accepted a sensible compromise (leaving the EU and ending free migration, but keeping free trade in place) they could have given Theresa May the votes she needed to get her "backstopped" Brexit deal through, and the economic impact would have been marginal.
What Labour actually did has paid off in the medium term, because everyone now blames the Tories for what happened and they've been clobbered at the last election. But it doesn't give you much confidence in how they'll approach their own challenges in government.
(And before anyone puts all the blame on Jeremy Corbyn: Keir Starmer was Labour's point man on Brexit, so this was his call as well)
Also: due to my excessive facebooking about Brexit while it was happening, I made an important discovery about the UK constitution! I now know how to save British democracy the next time something like this happens.
When Parliament is maliciously prorogued, the King can recall it by abdicating, which is one of the few sovereign powers the monarch hasn't handed over to the government of the day. Any vacancy of the throne, whether by death or abdication, constitutes "the demise of the Crown" and triggers the Succession to the Crown Act 1707, automatically calling Parliament back into session:
To some extent, yes. But I think overemphasizing that angle was also something the Remainers did to avoid looking at their own mistakes: a problem that exists in the US as well
I'm traveling and I have a bunch of work to catch up on, so I'm just going to leave this fly-by comment here.
Thank you, Matt Y, for writing about the concrete policy implications of GOP getting the trifecta. I think the p-word (rhymes with "shmivilege") has been overused badly and I hate using it, but based on the results of the recent SB user survey, a lot of us here are, uh, sheltered from the immediate effects of, say, a Medicaid cut. It's good for us to be told of these things!
But I hate, hate, hate the doom and gloom of "welp, Trump is unbeatable now because he's a martyr, and Biden is senile and stubborn and refuses to step down, so we are DOOMED to defeat, whaddya gonna do."
NO! F*** that! I am not going to just shrug my shoulders and say, that's it, it's all over! It may well be, but there's wayyyy too much self-fulfilling prophecy going on right now. We have to fight for our side to prevail! (Fight NONVIOLENTLY, in case that needed to be said, Jesus.)
My fellow lefty/liberal/Never Trumper Americans, we have to do what we can to help the Democrats win the election! If you're feeling hopeless, recite the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, watch Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate in "The Return of the King," listen to some badass epic music (I'm partial to this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc6APU8wum0 or do whatever else works for you, and then make a plan! Write letters to voters, donate if you can, canvass if you're in a swing district.
Once I'm back from my travels, I'll sign up to canvass for Dave Min in CA-47. And I'm writing letters to voters with Vote Forward; I can do that regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.
VOTES FOR THE VOTE GOD! TURNOUT FOR THE TURNOUT THRONE!
Thank you for pledging to engage with politics in an affirmative way. I would imagine, or at least hope, that many of us on this ‘Stack will do likewise this fall.
I will again be serving as an election precinct clerk or supervisor, not far from CA-47 territory, in fact. Given recent events I am realizing this may well be a tense day. I hope it is nothing more.
I will also look to donate to or serve a local campaign as my work schedule allows.
Well yes but actually no. If Biden is at the top of the ticket we are very much doomed to defeat (he’s behind the polls and every presidential poll with Trump running for president has *underestimated* Trump’s support).
Frankly, unless they replace Biden, that time spent trying to get Biden elected would be better spent on figuring out how to get a UK or EU passport.
Neither Matt nor Nate Silver understand the selfish cunning of Congressional Democrats. Yes, Biden is likely to lose, but his numbers have been stable in the polls. They only ticked down a couple points after Biden showed the world how poorly he functions on a bad night. Biden will do well enough for most safe seat Democrats to keep their seats.
An open convention is riskier for Democratic incumbents. The chosen candidate might flop completely and get wiped out. Whoever actually forces Biden out will make a lot of enemies. The selfishly rational play for Congressional Ds is to let Biden lose by 2-4 points, then ride thermostatic reaction against Trump to majorities in 2026, while keeping their seats, their staffs and the perquisites of office the whole time. Also, the less money donors give to Biden, the more the DCCC will pocket. The more afraid moderates become of Trump winning, the better the chances moderates split their tickets and vote for Democratic congressional candidates.
Many swing seat Democrats who need a good cycle to stay in office have called on Biden to step aside. This is why AOC has supported Biden but Golden and Perez want him out. It’s 90% selfish calculation.
I don't think the selfish cunning is any secret. Many Dems have leaked to the press that this is their strategy and are already planning on a second Trump presidency.
Nate’s article (in which he said prediction markets underestimated the odds of Biden dropping out) talked about “mutually assured destruction” and assumed Dems would continue to escalate until Biden exited. That’s one of Nate’s worst takes in a while.
Matt has called out Congressional Democrats on twitter but not really on his substack. Todays article- fretting about a landslide- probably overstates the downside of keeping Biden and clearly implies congressional Ds could get their oxen gored if they stick with Biden. He’s never written “cautious congressional Democrats might maximize their own advantage through keeping Biden on the ticket” on this blog, and that’s become an elephant in the room.
It’s hard to see how the chosen candidate could “flop completely” given the stakes—worst case scenario looks like getting the the same number of votes as Biden, with different people not voting or voting third party. The reason Biden’s polls only ticked down a couple of points is that most (maybe all?) of his voters, given a choice between his corpse and Donald Trump, would go with the dead guy.
It’s more of an intervention—everyone in the party was prepared to support him if he was able to run. Then he got up in front of 50 million people and proved he wasn’t.
If daddy is drinking too much, the kid who speaks up first often gets beaten. It’s only if he goes to rehab that the first mover wins. Biden is drunk on his own importance and those who challenge it are taking risks
I’m also beginning to wonder if the reason why we aren’t hearing more support for the obvious replacement choice for Biden- Harris- is that she herself has put the word out she doesn’t want it? Has she calculated that 2024 is already over and she’ll have a better shot in 2028 if she’s at the bottom of the 2024 ticket not the top?
I think it's just too risky for her to be seen as undercutting the President as the Vice. Her best argument is being the legitimate heir, which gets undermined if she looks disloyal.
But without a champion the dump Biden movement is completely dependent on Biden voluntarily stepping aside.
With or without a champion, the only way Biden can be replaced is if he voluntarily steps aside. He is the sole decision-maker under the rules. This is basically about what can persuade Joe to put his party before himself.
*Practically* speaking, it would be very difficult to remove him as the nominee against his will, sure. And it might well be a disaster if he were to fight it until the bitter end. And I acknowledge that his delegates refusing to nominate him is a stretch. But if he's behind by 10-12 points in mid August AND he's suffered additional, fairly bad gaffes?
But with respect to the RULES, delegates can exercise the "good conscience" loophole. I think it's super unlikely it'll come to that. But I don't think it's near impossible that the *threat* of such a development is what could finally convince the president to step down. Especially if the threat were delivered quietly by people with names like Chuck, Nancy and Hakeem.
The willingness of Biden delegates to invoke the Good Conscience clause would obviously be a critical question in the event Biden isn't willing to go (which as of now is still the case). I'm hearing his political operation has been phoning them to shore up support. I hope it doesn't come to that, since it's seems it might well be a long shot. On the other hand, if a month from now he's (even more) obviously on his way to a loss—complete with damaging, additional gaffes and an ever-growing poll lead for Trump—and calls for him to step down have grown to a crescendo? Who knows? AFAIK only 51% of his delegates have to invoke the clause.
Look, if I were a betting man I'd bet that (1) Biden remains the nominee, and (2) Trump wins the election. But we're in an unsettled time. And I do expect Trump's numbers are going to look very strong very soon. Which means Biden's are going to look very weak very soon. I don't think he's a lock to be the nominee.
You’re definitely correct about that- but others could be advocating for her, and it doesn’t seem like that’s happening and I’m trying to understand why.
No strategy gives her more than a 40% chance this year or more than a 10% chance in ‘28. To win in 28 Biden has to win this year and things have to go well for Harris.
It means that if Biden resigns and she is VP, she is president. If she runs while Biden is POTUS, then that will be a mess. If she is VP until 2028, then someone else might win the primary (and that someone will be younger.)
>It means that if Biden resigns and she is VP, she is president.<
Yes. That's how the constitution works! But, do you think she could win the election as POTUS, or would that also be a mess?
If, miracle of miracles, Biden bows out, my personal preference would be for him to (1) remain in office until the nominee is decided, and then (2) resign the presidency if Harris is the nominee.
It would be highly awkward for him to resign if Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is the nominee. I have zero idea if, in stepping aside from the race, it's plausible he'd resign the White House (maybe it isn't). But if he does go that route, he really can't do so unless/until Harris is assured the nomination (maybe she would be absolutely assured of being nominated for the top of the ticket if she's already POTUS, but I'd want to be 100% sure).
I'm not sure Harris would "be a mess" if she's running for president this fall and serving as Vice President. But I do think a "clean break" from Biden's highly tarnished brand will be a heavy lift. Trump obviously will continue to campaign against BIDEN-Harris as long as Joe is in the White House.
Biden is able to be President until Jan. 20, 2025. He should keep that job. If Harris is the nominee then she can spend 24/7 running the most vigorous campaign possible.
The idea that she could mount a campaign *at the same time* she is learning to be President is, forgive me, nuts.
(1) It's possible Harris doesn't want it. I doubt it, but it's possible. (Surely it's a competitive race with a reset. Trump's pretty widely disliked).
(2) But in any event she'll take the nomination if it's there. Why wait until you're pushing into your mid 60s? It's highly doubtful she'd be a lot more viable in 2028—when she'd have to fight for the nomination—than in 2024, when she might get it by default.
While I more or less share Yglesias's doomerism with respect to Biden's chances, I don't see Harris-Beshear or Harris-Cooper (or whoever) being anything but a pretty compelling ticket (I'd probably go with Whitmer if I were the Vice President—echoes of '92).
"An open convention is riskier for Democratic incumbents. The chosen candidate might flop completely and get wiped out."
What I really haven't heard people talking about is why the replacement candidate who is not Kamala Harris wants to put themselves out there and probably lose to Trump, rather than taking their time and building up to be a candidate in 2028 when the backlash to Trump will be in full swing? Isn't the percentage play to wait this one out, rather than try an ill-timed, rushed candidacy?
If I were a Democratic presidential hopeful, I'd think my odds against Trump and a short campaign where no one has time to build a strong hatred machine and I can skip the small-differences dumb arguments of a primary seems pretty attractive for my chances. I personally think that long campaigns are actually a huge detriment to candidates' popularity.
I wonder if the logic of the squad (and far left in general) goes even further. If you really want to reshape government (and society), you need a “revolution”* (either Bernie style or non-democratic style). So, you want things to be as bad as possible to increase the odds of getting a non-moderate, left-wing candidate elected in 2028 (or even for a non-democratic revolution). Keeping Biden in the race increases the chance of Trump winning, which increases the chances of things getting really bad, which increases the chances that the far left gets to do their thing… I hope that’s not the logic, but maybe it is.
It's definitely the logic among some (self-styled?) radicals and far-leftists. Maybe far-rightists too, I have less awareness of what they say.
It's called accelerationism. The status quo will lead to disaster, they say, and it can only be fixed by revolution. Since we don't have popular support for the revolution now, what we need is for the disasters to happen quickly, so a critical number of people find the status quo intolerable and will join us in tearing it all down.
Personally, I'm adamantly opposed to accelerationism. Very skeptical of revolutions -- their track record is not great, and revolutions that succeed in gaining power often result in tyranny and mass death. I'm also against making things worse on purpose (shocking, i know). I hope no one with any real political power is intentionally trying to do the one thing in service of the other.
Yeah, in my dark imaginings I believe this is why Bernie and AOC endorsed Biden recently. To "enhance the contradictions." The worse the Biden defeat, the better for their cause.
Like the German Communist Party in 1929 refusing to cooperate with the center-left, no contradictions were heightened post-Hitler and they were all sent to the death camps.
Not sure how you can write this post without talking about the courts and judges. The overturning of Chevron is going to be huge here.
The dream of donor class, the reason they’ve bribed Clarence Thomas to stay on the court, is to completely dismantle environmental regulation and labor protection. I really think it’s gone under the radar a) that’s already happened to an extent and b) will be supercharged with recent SCOTUS decisions.
For those of you looking at this half glass full because Matt has spent a lot of his time lately bashing lefty NIMBYs and lefty non-profits and that maybe GOP will make needed to changes that will lead to more housing and more green tech investment I would seriously take a closer look at the animating spirit behind Trumpism. Go look at polling on housing; GOP voters are on average more NIMBY than left leaning voters. It’s just that in places like SF and NYC (though not necessarily the suburbs) it’s left NIMBYs who are the problem. The GOP NIMBY is more of the “protect the housewives in the suburbs” culture war nonsense.
As for investment in green tech. Go look at project 2025 and see how it wants to overturn the “Green New Deal”. I admonished Noah Smith for being too nice to the GOP platform in part by noting that talk of repealing the Green New Deal is completely looney tunes. But it’s perfectly in keeping with the “never give up you gas stoves”, “the libs want to ban hamburgers” and maybe most important “gas guzzling cars are what true manly man man man drive”. Think Matt is really underrating the possibility IRA is overturned as some cultural war bone to throw to their Newsmax/Fox News watching base.
I have yet to understand why someone would mourn the loss of Chevron while also recognizing that Trump is likely to be the next President. Curbing executive power is particularly good when a bad person is probably going to be wielding that power.
Note: I don't subscribe the outcome-based constitutional analysis I reference above. I think Chevron falling is a better reading of the APA. The SCOTUS majority opinion overturning Chevron is compelling, and much more persuasive than the dissent.
This is my point really. A trifecta or at the very least a GOP controlled senate (especially one with a 4-5 seat majority) is going to nominate only the most ideologically "pure" judges.
As Matt has noted a number of times, law school grads are overwhelmingly Democrats. And as I have noted here a few times (and Matt noted) religious attendance has dropped tremendously over the past 20 years which means like all orgs that lose members the ones who remain tend to be more extreme. It's a toxic stew for having a lot of lunatic GOP judges who are also at the same time likely woefully underprepared for the job.
There are a lot more Matthew Kascymarks out there and 5th circuit clearly sees itself as FedSoc foot soldiers first and judges second. Overturning Chevron is all about empowering these people.
I just genuinely am so disappointed that after all this time there are too many centrist and left of center people who still "trust" that right wing judges will actually follow precedent and procedure despite massive evidence to the contrary.
I can't wait for the courts to weigh in on whether EPA's limit of 15 parts per billion for lead contamination is correct or if it should be 50 parts per billion, per plaintiff's claims.
I would so trust judges' ability to decide those levels.
I think something that gets lost in the panic about Chevron is that it does not force judges to second-guess agency experts, they are just no longer forced to defer to agency experts. I hope that the result is some really bad ideologically-driven, corrupt-looking decisions and really gross litigation that creates sufficient backlash to cause (a future) congress to pass better laws instead of outsourcing everything to the executive branch. Of course, I am also cynical and an unrepentant optimist.
I think “write better laws” is a bit of a daft way to say Chevron doesn’t matter. Congress always could add more detail on a regulation and still can. But writing a statute that says “maintain drinkable water” and having agency experts interpret that is far better than “keep arsenic levels below x parts per million and pig shit below y parts”. If Congress attempts to fill that breach, there are only two realistic outcomes. 1. It simply does not know what it’s doing or 2. The arsenic polluters and pig farmers lobby for meaningless limits because they have a huge concentrated interest in the outcome compared to a less salient interest from the public more generally. With no Chevron now we can let untrained and unelected judges do that. That is the worst of the options.
1) There is no reason that the expertise at the agencies cannot be brought to Congress!
2) The problem with agencies is that Congress says keep the water clean for drinking and agencies say "that means we need to regulate soda because it has water and people drink it" when that is clearly NOT what was intended by Congress.
You're right that Congress can upgrade its expertise. And will need to do so. But as I see it, institutional architecture makes the executive branch a natural place to at least do SOME of the fine-tuning of the implementation of enactments. And that's because novel situations and unforeseen conditions frequently arise—this is inevitable even if Congress could staff itself with an army of Einsteins.
Executive branch offices that can fine-tune on the fly in response to the exigencies of the real world help us govern effectively. Congress's problem isn't lack of experts: its problem is that legislating is hard and often slow, and it is unlikely to be able to increase the *tempo* of legislation to replace the executive branch rule-making we've gotten used to.
These are institutional muscles that have atrophied because it's been easier to hand all of it off to the executive branch to figure out. Plus they can blame bureaucrats instead of being responsible!
But if you actually want Congress to be able to legislate, you need to remove this crutch and require they do their job. You want a body of government that doesn't have the expertise to provide discrete instructions to an agency to pass a law that dramatically changes the status quo in the country?
I don't mean pass laws with more specific language, I mean clarify the role of experts and the structure and purpose of agencies. A lot of what we fight about today is because people were choking on smog and rivers were catching fire in the 60's and 70's, so we passed laws and created agencies to deal with those problems.
Congress has amended the Clean Air Act many times to keep up with modern sources of air pollution, but they dither on really important issues stemming from global warming that don't seem to fall under the rubric of "clean air". My sincere hope is that empowering the judiciary to effectively (re)write regulations will lead to public pressure on Congress to settle some of these important regulatory matters for the coming decades.
I am not convinced agency experts always do a better job. For example, a few years back, people were losing their minds about the Trump administration loosening rules on mercury pollution in the air, which otherwise was going to cost companies millions of dollars to address. I actually read the EPA report justifying the rule and found the causal chain of evidence *incredibly* weak. I don't recall all the details but essentially it was that a tiny additional amount of mercury was going to get into the soil, leach into the freshwater, be taken up by fish, be eaten by mostly poor pregnant women who catch their own, and cause a decrease in the IQ of their babies by a few thousandths of a point. These slightly dumber kids would grow up and be worse at their jobs, thus lowering their economic value. It was only by aggregating these otherwise imperceptible effects over thousands of people that they could claim with a straight face that the economic cost of the rule was less than the impact of the pollution.
Now maybe you say "we're a rich country and we shouldn't have to deal with any mercury getting into the environment, even if the risk is practically nil", and I would consider that argument. But don't claim otherwise.
I don't have super-strong priors about Chevron, but if I were designing a constitutional order from scratch, I would absolutely not have a bunch of law school graduates in robes making judgements about 'the causal chain of evidence' in mercury reports or whatever. That's just a terrible system. (When was the last science class these guys took? Senior year of high school?)
Judges are not Mentats who will wisely know the right course of action on literally any subject. Feels like we're drifting in that direction by appointing the judiciary to be the 'mercury evidence measurers' or whatever. I have a lot of concerns about the over-judicialization of the US. I'd rather see agencies have more stability than and less turnover every four years
The best way is for Congress to make the determination. I'm not sure there is a second-best way. But I don't think any of us know how this will play out. My suspicion is that we'll hardly notice any difference.
No, they will not be. Chevron and agency law is not about the object level of the policy question; it's about what the agencies are authorized to do by law, and whether they get to stretch their jurisdiction to all the issues they want to regulate whether or not Congress actually gave them that authority.
Also, the decision overturning Chevron wasn't the big admin law decision of this term. Chevron "deference" was never as clear or stable or impactful as people make it out to be.
The more impactful admin law decision is likely to be Corner Post -- which interpreted the meaning of the word "accrue" in the APA statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations that don't comply with law. And it resolved the issue by concluding that "accrue" in this statute of limitations means the same thing that any ordinary litigator across the country would ordinarily understand that word to mean in any other statute of limitations.
Loper Bright and Corner Post actually work in synergy; Loper Bright restricts agency jurisdiction-stretching, and Corner Post allows even old regulations which had been previously blessed (either tacitly or actively) under the old Chevron regime to be brought back into the courts when a new business suffers harm because of them.
"Not sure how you can write this post without talking about the courts and judges."
As much as I enjoy Matt's writing overall, his, "LOL! Courts don't matter!" schtick is arguably his actual worst take, even more so than supporting the Iraq War or thinking that there's nothing wrong with spoilers.
Is Matt's take "courts don't matter", or is his take "courts just make stuff up"? It's my understanding that he's more in the latter camp, and I think if he was in the former, he wouldn't be strongly calling for Sotomayor to retire. I do wish, and I think we've concurred on this before, that Matt would put a little more effort into understanding the common and rising legal interpretations out there, even if does think it's made up stuff.
I think "courts just make stuff up" for most practical purposes turns into "courts don't matter." E.g., he's never tried to talk about the First Amendment implications of banning TikTok when he mentions doing it.
The way I interpreted Matt's take on the TikTok ban (and as you know, that frustrated me as much as it did you) is that they should just give it a shot, and if the courts strike it down then we're no worse off--but maybe they'll make something up that will uphold it. To me, "courts don't matter" implies endorsing "John Roberts has made his decision, now let him enforce it" style ignoring tactics.
How are the end of Chevron deference and YIMBYism connected? This is about federal, not state or local law. The impact on housing would be pretty much zilch. So anyone who thinks the Raimundo case is good for YIMBYism needs a reality check.
I guess it's not the most important thing in the world, but I'm surprised Matt didn't mention that one of the first things a Republican trifecta would do is cut IRS funding, which would allow rich people to cheat on their taxes without penalty
If we want automatic stabilizers in place for the next recession, putting them in during a time when spending cuts are needed might get bipartisan support.
For instance, this Cruz-Sessions bill (10yrs of work outside the US before eligible for H1B, no OPT) would ~completely destroy skilled immigration. Seems very bad.
Democrats are getting discourse'd out of their "democracy is on the ballot" message, which lots of people on the left disliked because it had no *policy* stakes. All that unpopular Ryan budget stuff, just not in the mix, bc you're talking about Jan. 6 instead.
I do wonder if that changes, even though Democrats (inc. the Biden campaign) resent being told that their attacks on Trump are retroactively Dangerous and they shouldn't be mean to him.
Not just discoursed out of the democracy message—testing shows it's not as effective as other stuff like abortion. That said, I don't think that means the message isn't true. Trump is in fact a thr
The one saving grace here is Congressional Dems are running well ahead of Biden. Root for some split ticket voting.
Or, more pointedly, start to adjust your strategy for engaging with this campaign accordingly. Matt's been catching a lot of shit on Twitter for his doomerism stance, but Biden's been behind for *months* in most polls. Swing state races look especially grim. Behind in Nevada. NH is in play. Maybe even Minnesota. Etc. If Trump's lead widens much more AND Democrats abandon ticket reset effort, emphasis will start to shift to protecting down ticket races. That's the cold reality.
The biggest problem is we are working in an uncertain information environment. The accuracy of polls is hard to measure.
I don’t think replacing Biden will change the malaise and ill defined discontent many people feel. I also don’t see how changing who governs resolves any of the supposed problems the country faces.
>The accuracy of polls is hard to measure.<
Polling analysis is challenging, agreed! But not impossible. I've read enough to be convinced Joe Biden's chances are very weak. The question of how Democrats would fare with a different ticket is the "uncertain information" bit. I personally believe the answer is "better." We'll never know for sure (even if Harris-Pritzker beat Trump-Vance, we'll still be unable to visit the universe where Biden-Harris was the ticket. So you can never be *sure* what's what).
>I also don’t see how changing who governs resolves any of the supposed problems the country faces.<
I think Democratic Party governance can't solve all of our problems. But implying it can't solve *any* of them seems wrong. And from my perspective governance by the party of FDR is a lot less likely to create terrible *new* problems (Withdrawal from NATO? Trade War on steroids? Sabotage of safety net programs? War with Iran? Pushing the judiciary even further to the right? Cutting off Ukraine? Climate change denialism? Massive increase in deficit?). I also, needless to say, don't think a serious assault on our constitution is implausible.
My second comment was in reference to voters handing things to Republicans, not a different Democratic administration (which would be effectively status quo.)
Ah, got it. So you're not quite as nihilistic as I feared!
I just think we are operating in a black box and replacing Biden would result in a weaker Democratic position than if Biden remained. (Lots of the wishcasters understate how damaging it would be for the person replacing Biden and all the negative media spin.)
"The accuracy of polls is hard to measure."
Eh. Nate Silver's "the polls are typically off by at most 4-5 pps" hasn't failed yet.
The risk for congressional Dems might be marginal voters becoming so meh to Biden, even ones that can't stand Trump, that they stay home, depriving congressional Dems of coattails.
Dems need to put the ”stop Trump from gaining a super majority and controlling all branches of government plus the SC” message front and center now that it’s clear Biden will lose. Even many people who will vote for Trump might want to have some checks and balances.
If voters are most concerned about cost of living, Trump + Dem Congress could be a worse situation than Biden + GOP Congress when it comes to deficit reduction and thus freeing up Fed on interest rates a bit more.
Polymarket has the odds of a GOP sweep at 54%. And Biden is now more likely than not to lose the national POPULAR vote for the first time since that contract started. Even a fair bit of split ticket voting may not save the Dems in the house at this point, and the Senate map is terrible for the Dems.
What are the chances we get good policy outcomes from the present batch of craven cowards inhabiting the Democratic benches in Congress? Maybe it’s better to heighten the contradictions and get politicians with the balls to win.
”Let’s sit out this election to heighten the contradictions and after Hitler fails we will take over” / The German Communist Party in 1929
Can't really agree with this as strategy; however, it might work as consolation.
I don't think these ordinary policy questions are reason enough to vote for an empty chair or blank check for President. The only thing that can justify that is concern about a serious even if low-probability threat to democracy.
For example, many of these federal safety net programs could stand to be rethought and redesigned. A real debate over that in itself isn't something to fear to shy away from. The problem is that, on their own, Democrats won't do it. And on their own, Republicans will do it badly.
So, if we're setting aside democracy concerns for a moment, the key to all of this -- whether it's an opportunity for good changes or just bad ones -- seems to be whether Democrats keep enough seats in Congress to keep a seat at the negotiating table. And then assuming they have leverage, whether they use it well.
For example, if funding is kept constant, what exactly is the problem with changing Medicaid to a block grant program, and letting states do more experimentation to find better ways of funding healthcare for those of limited means? There are many ways to skin that cat, and the way Medicaid currently does is just one way, by no means the only or best way. But Democrats treat even the mention of change as a threat to be demonized, and Republicans just want to slash and burn. And so nothing productive ever advances, just stasis and political trench warfare nobody is happy and neither side is able to break out of a status quo that everyone seems to agree isn't that great.
Fixed block based funding for medicaid would allow less flexibility for program expansion and give red state governors the ability to make program cuts. Basically every think tank in Washington, from center-right to the left, thinks it's a surefire way to take health care away from lower-income Americans.
Also, even with Biden's current state, he's clearly not an empty chair or blank check.
It seems reasonable to think that, even if he’s not an empty chair now, Biden may be by 2028. And I don’t have confidence in those around him to remove him from office in the event that he significantly deteriorates to the point where he clearly can’t do the job.
Why would block grants allow *less* flexibility?
So what would happen if those cuts go through? Migration of those poorer people to blue states?
Probably not, but it's a very interesting question. Housing is generally much less affordable in blue states, and if you're poor enough for medicaid to matter to you then you a move to NJ or California might leave you homeless.
This also seems like a questionable way of assessing the likely policy outcomes of a Republican trifecta.
What if someone had analyzed the likely outcomes of a Democratic trifecta in 2020 like this? Going off of the party’s platform and members’ stated policy goals, you would’ve thought we’d maybe get a massive change in the “care economy”, a Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and an overhaul of the healthcare system, at the very least.
But understanding the messy nature of congressional policy making (plus all the trifecta-proof veto points), it was utterly predictable that the outcome would be factional infighting leading to a hodgepodge of spending that typical voters don’t have the expertise to understand.
Similarly, with Republicans my guess is that once again factional infighting and internal ideological disagreements will lead to much less substantive policy progress than what, say, McConnell would hope for. Is Trump better able to control intrafactional infighting than Biden? I doubt it.
One of the things that makes the Republican trifecta significantly more daunting than the democratic trifecta is the way big ticket republican priorities fit into reconciliation and big ticket lefty ones don’t.
Like you could zero out most spending on the poor and let people starve to death on the streets with 50 senators but you can’t change almost anything that isn’t moving money around.
Also the Supreme Court is far less of a check on Republicans.
A quibble with this line of reasoning: a simple, bare trifecta with the minimum possible of majorities has the features you describe. But a trifecta within the reach of Republicans presently doesn’t. A minority in the House effectively has no power whatsoever. They can’t even shape debate effectively due to the way the House structures committees and controls votes. The Senate is a little different, but a 3-4 Senator majority basically makes every moderate Republican vote irrelevant if Republicans are willing to make their agenda work through simple majorities (either through reconciliation or by nuking the filibuster).
I think the Republicans probably correctly see the filibuster as more beneficial to them than not. They've also shown time and time again that they prefer (illegal) immigration as an issue to actually doing something about it. Absent super majority I think chances of big time legislation are low. Only then will they have no choice but to pass things. Instead we will have tax and program cuts through reconciliation, executive action, and more federalist society judges. Aka repeat of Trump 1.
I think you're discounting the sense of hubris that a huge victory would imbue them with. To say they'll think they're on a mission from the Almighty may not be that much of a stretch.
I mean, shoot, even the Democrats coming in with the tiniest majority possible in 2021 thought they were the reincarnation of the 1933 FDR majority.
1) Most Republican policy goals can be adopted through reconciliation and don’t require a supermajority even under the current filibuster rules.
2) I don’t believe a Republican Senate would resist demands by President Trump to eliminate the filibuster for significant legislation. There are only a couple Republican Senators that could be confident in surviving a Trump backed primary challenge.
3) I think a 4-6 Senator lead will cause Republicans to be confident in holding the majority of the Senate for a long time. Whether that confidence would be misplaced is debatable, but there’s little doubt the map heavily favors Republicans presently.
re #2, they resisted in his first administration, why wouldn't they do so again?
They should recognize that Trump is gone in at most 4 years, while they hope to be around for a longer.
McCain and Romney are gone. McConnell and Graham have fallen into line. It is a different Republican Senate.
Unclear though how they will react to “big time legislation” endorsed by Trump—if they owe him their seats, why wouldn’t they go for it? This is looking like a one-man party, men like that tend to get their way.
I suspect this is less and less likely to be that big a deal. Trump is old, and, like, look, we aren't going back to 2019. Presidents don't have a lot of control over the macroeconomic situation, and Trump benefitted from that in 2016-2019 and today will have either inflation or high interest rates no matter what he does (which will rapidly degrade his popularity among people who currently remember 2019 and imagine that reelecting Trump will reproduce 2019). And of course he can't run in 2028.
I think all of that empowers Congressional Republicans to not care THAT much about what he wants. I mean, don't get me wrong, he'll still be President, he'll still have influence, but I don't think he'll have as much power as you're imagining.
Oh he’ll successfully bully the Fed to lower rates
They will get immigration as an issue by doing huge, constitutional-boundary-pushing enforcement acton in front of the cameras and letting everyone react.
If they got rid of the awful, undemocratic filibuster they would at least accomplish one positive thing.
I think what you are describing is "the system working". Winning elections requires papering over disagreements that then burst into the open when trying to govern. For Republicans, that disagreement is over reproductive rights.
There is clearly a large faction of Republicans who see Trump as a vehicle for their goals of fetal personhood, banning birth control, etc. And they are becoming louder as a second Trump term comes into focus. "Leave it up to the states" might work for the campaign, but not once they take power. When that fight breaks out in public, it is likely to be paralytic to legislating and electoral poison for Republicans. I can easily picture the "we have to blow up the filibusterer to protect unborn life" faction butting heads with the "imagine what Democrats will do with that power in the future" McConnell faction.
Remember the courts. Remember Chevron being overturned.
The greatest trick Mitch McConnell ever pulled, was hiding the football with GOP economic platform and having it shadow enacted in the courts. The culture war stuff unfortunately distracts from the fact that courts are where most of the GOP donor class platform (outside of tax cuts) will get passed.
Overturning Chevron isn't a 'shadow GOP economic platform'
Arguably it is. The GOP wants the federal bureaucracy to have less power to regulate business, and they want lawsuits against regulation to be more likely to succeed. Overturning Chevron achieves that.
Maybe at the margins? It also constrains GOP administrations from weakening regulations so it's far from clear that even that is true.
I am not a scholar but I am an attorney in the federal govt who works on rulemakings. I have seen the hot takes that the end of Chevron may occasionally cause headaches for conservatives attempting regulatory rollbacks. And, sure, it could happen and probably will in at least a few instances.*
But there is a reason the conservative legal movement has been pursuing this for decades and a reason the conservative Justices have been licking their chops to water down, weaken, and ultimately abrogate any deference enjoyed by executive agencies. It forces agencies to engage in activity only expressly within their statutory mandates. That means fewer industries that can be regulated, fewer transactions that can be regulated, less conduct that can be regulated, etc. Because when the administrative state is built upon statutes that are mostly from the Big Government era of ~1936 to ~1976, there is a lot of ambiguity as to what modern conduct is reached by those statutes. The times change, businesses evolve, and labels that once squarely applied no longer do. Chevron allowed agencies to operate in those gray areas, which almost necessarily grew as statutes aged. Regulation of those gray areas will now be extremely difficult. And agency heads are often risk-averse (except I suppose some of the Warrenite ones) so they try to avoid the embarrassment of a regulatory effort being wasted on a gray area.
Maybe regulation is bad! I've certainly seen that. And yes, I get the argument that Congress can always pass a new law if courts prevent executive agencies from carrying out a law in line with Congress's intent. But the idea that the end of Chevron was a mixed basket for the Right... I do not see it that way, from my limited but relevant vantage point.
*I mainly see Chevron as presenting risk for regulatory rollbacks where a statute *requires* an agency to engage in certain regulation. So, in theory, the end of Chevron could make it harder for agencies to avoid that statutory mandate. But, in my experience, there are far more statutes that *empower* agencies to regulate certain conduct. And even the statutory mandates usually empower agencies to create exception and exemptions, so... in summation: the loss of leeway to regulate is greater than the loss of leeway to deregulate.
Only a few regulations are bad, but those are doozies. The test of whether ending Chevron deference will be worth it is whether expansive megaprojects become dirt cheap next year bc of no need for bullshit environmental impact statements.
We won't know the balance of things for years - but I'm deeply skeptical that overturning Chevron is going to have a measurable impact for several reasons.
a) The grey areas that you are highlighting is covered under major questions doctrine not Chevron, so isn't implicated at all.
b) Just because a statue is ambiguous doesn't mean that a court will never agree with the agency.
c) The judiciary, for all practical purposes, is split ideologically with very, very few cases ever reaching SCOTUS.
I think it'll probably end up somewhere in between what you and TR are saying. It all comes down to getting lower level courts to bite on what interpretation they're going for, and then for enough justices on SCOTUS to not see it as an absurd interpretation.
EDIT: and to your second sentence, that's one of the mysteries that will need to be answered. Will SCOTUS be even handed in being more active in determining ambiguous language, or will Alito style hackery win out the day and they'll only pick on Democratic administrations?
Yeah, I mean, the original Chevron decision was about allowing Reagan’s EPA to relax environmental regulations without interference from the courts. But I do think TR is right about where the GOP's head is at right now.
Yes, and the only chance of that being stopped is having a Democratic president and Senate majority. Unfortunately, it seems like Matt has given up on even trying to hold the Presidency. But it's worth noting that even if Democrats somehow win back the House, Trump and a Republican Senate can maintain a 6-3 majority or even expand the majority, in addition to adding judges in other courts.
I know it's difficult to assess the policy implications of the Court, but seems like something Matt should consider doing some time between now and November.
>There are many ways to skin that cat<
When Mississippi and Oklahoma skin the cat, lower income Missippians and Oklahomans get fucked over. Blunt language, I know, but also honest language.
A disaster for the poor isn't an exaggeration.
Honestly I would trust most red states to figure out the best way to handle their own poverty issues over most 1-size-fits-all federal government programs. Big blue states struggling with homelessness and overburdened tax systems seem to be farther away from solving their own problems.
That must be why the Old Confederacy's HDI kicks so much ass.
This is not a serious reply.
First because I'm pretty sure we're talking about GOP vs Dem controlled states and not the Old Confederacy. Otherwise, yes, Virginia's HDI does kick ass, but West Virginia's does not, and you have to get into reasons for that which are not relevant.
But it's also just substantially a weak dodge. Many red areas (but not all) do a good job caring for their poorest, but they often go about it in very different ways. And many Blue areas (not all) are really struggling with certain social issues that are very rare in red areas. Is the "Old Confederacy" struggling with homelessness and drug addiction? Not nearly as much the liberal West Coast or Northeast. So I think we can safely say that Blue states haven't figured out the answer to every question.
Wrt poverty the question is which levels of government are best situated to help. I don't think it's so crazy to think the answer could be the state-level or lower.
>First because I'm pretty sure we're talking about GOP vs Dem controlled states and not the Old Confederacy.<
Yes. You know perfectly well what I'm referring to. Thanks for the reveal. Also, I didn't talk about slicing and dicing that region: if we indeed look at the Old Confederacy, I'm quite confident HDI would be indeed be less than the national average, and quite a bit less than states outside that region controlled by Democrats. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama etc would swamp the one state that managed to join Blue America. This is broadly true if we're talking about poverty, life expectancy, obesity, highway safety, homicide, income, per capita GDP., and so on.
So yes, you'll have to forgive me for being squeamish about handing over large chunks of no-strings federal revenue to (MAGA-dominated) state government so utterly determined to hold back progress, and the development of their own people. It seems like it might on net be bad for both the people in question and America!
" You know perfectly well what I'm referring to."
I sincerely don't, partly because I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Initially you mentioned Oklahoma, but now you seem to be angrily focused only on the old confederacy.
But anyhow - how did Virginia "join Blue America"? It did that by having it's population shift towards urbanized, educated professional due to their urbanized, high-paying areas. This is similar to Atlanta or the Research Triangle in NC or Florida or Houston or Dallas. The causality isn't "voted Blue and then the cities grew".
Rural areas the world over lag urban ones in development and lag in HDI...so what? West Virginia, Arkansas, and many Appalachian or Southern states were behind in all the metrics you mentioned when they were Blue states and now they are as red states. Again, so what? Forgive me for looking at how badly run Los Angeles or Chicago are and then sympathizing with those who wonder if Democrats' vision of progress will be the best thing for Alabama.
There’s plenty of poverty and homelessness in the old confederacy too. People just get jailed for vagrancy and drug possession, and housing is cheaper. There’s less money sloshing around the nonprofit sector to help the homeless, so nonprofits are often more efficient in the South. So yeah, fewer visible manifestations of poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction - though I would encourage you to take a drive through South Memphis or North Memphis and ask if that’s worse or better than the encampments on the Left Coast; you might surprise yourself.
You can agree with these policies, thinking the Sourh does things right, and with some of them I even do, and some of them are just the consequences of a less is more touch, but they’re profoundly unrelated to the Medicaid block grant question! You are in fact arguing for state government cronies to embezzle the money!
If my tax dollars are going to Mississippi for supporting their poor, damned if I'm OK with giving local politicians there carte blanche about how my money is going to be spent.
I thought we were talking about what would happen if tax dollars for poverty stopped going there?
In this twisted braid of a comment thread, who the hell knows. But it was kicked off with a comment about making Medicaid a fixed block grant to the states.
Ah I see.
Isn’t Medicaid already a fixed block grant?
And then there’s Mississippi and Louisiana
But should you be making those decisions for Mississippi and Oklahoma (unless you live in Mississippi or Oklahoma)? The whole point of federalism is that the federal government doesn't make every decision about how states run their affairs, including with regard to the economically disadvantaged.
I think if medicaid were a wholly state program I'd agree with you but in every state I know of the Feds pick up a lot of the bill. Giving them a bunch of money they can spend on unrelated things to balance their state budgets while poor residents don't get the meds they need is a federal concern.
I mean, do we really want to get into the historical reasons why too much deference to federalism or to put in maybe more accurate, states rights has been problematic?
And yes it applies here. It's not a mistake that the deep south has the stingiest social safety net in the country. I mean, I feel like this is sort of under the radar one of the ugliest scandals of the last few years. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/brett-favre-welfare-mississippi.html. It matters to me that a state government can be this callous to its most vulnerable citizens.
And this is one of the main ways we get Trumpism - the (accurate) perception of many that elites are telling them how to run their lives or their local governments.
I may agree with you about safety nets, but I live in NY, not Mississippi. And, jeez, have you ever seen how the NY state government is run? We're not really an examplar. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to quarrel with the probity of Mississippi state expenditures.
Live in NY, depressingly aware.
I would really take a look at Mississippi state governance. Read that welfare scandal again and then look at how stingy welfare benefits are in Mississippi including how onerous they make qualification. This is some real "sheriff of Nottingham" stuff.
We an also get into Jackson, Mi water crisis. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/06/28/timeline-jackson-mississippi-water-problems
NY gets a ton more press for some pretty obvious reasons...and a lot of valid (NYC somehow only discovering trash cans work is this Simpson clip come to life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZgtEdFAg3s). But this not actually mean that states with a lot less national press scrutiny are themselves paragons of good governance or good policy.
"I mean, do we really want to get into the historical reasons why too much deference to federalism or to put in maybe more accurate, states rights has been problematic?"
Too much of anything is a problem. Are you arguing that letting states decide poverty issues will lead directly to segregated water fountains? This is completely silly, and appealing to what is may be the poorest and most corrupt state in the union is pure cherry-picking. Should we take NM's many failures as the best reflection of Dem policies, also?
The fact that Mississippi is messing something up is not much of a reflection on what Georgia or Idaho is going to do. If it's red state politics than look into how Blue-run Jackson, MS, and other Dem areas of that state are doing.
I would read about the process by which necessary improvements to the water system were not enacted. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/mississippi-governor-who-opposed-water-system-repairs-blames-jackson-for-crisis
I don't post this to say Jackson, MS shouldn't have done more, but talking about "blue cities" and "red states" when stuff like infrastructure is being discussed is a red herring.
Do you think crime, poverty and education problems in Jackson, MS, are primarily the fault of the red state legislature?
Or look at the ranking of corruption on this page:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-corrupt-states
Is red / blue control the biggest predictor? Sure doesn't seem like it to me.
Beat me to referencing that scandal by seven minutes, for a moment I thought I had awoken soon enough to fit it in.
Why shouldn't I? If poor Virginians are in my circle of empathy, why not poor Oklahomans and Mississippians?
Because claiming to care equally about everything and everyone everywhere, is virtually indistinguishable in practice from not caring much about anyone anywhere.
All else equal, your circle of empathy should largely overlap with your circle of efficacy. Otherwise you're spending a lot of time and energy thinking and getting upset about things that aren't in your control anyway.
Personally I think that Americans should care about our countrymen but YMMV
A glib response that completely misses the point, or intentionally avoids it, as the case may be. Nobody who's not crazy thinks every issue in the vast country should be decided at the federal level, nor that every issue should be handled at the local or state level. There's a huge range for reasonable disagreement about what issues, at any given period, are best handled at what level. What made sense fifty years ago might not make sense or be the best that we can do today, or fifty years from today. And trying to shut down any discussion of that with glib dodges that either don't comprehend the issue or intentionally try to keep it from being discussed is not constructive.
Caring about someone who you have little ability to impact doesn't count for much
This just seems like a recipe for total political disengagement.
I would say it's a recipe for #1) focusing more on local gov, which would be a great thing and #2) focusing your national attention on your local representatives in the national government
But I don't believe that block granting creates efficiency. If I make the leap towards wanting my tax dollars to pay for Medicaid in my own state, I don't really see how it's significantly complicated by making it federal. That hasn't been show of claimed in Zack's comment. The claim is about preferences, and yes, to me, treating these groups differently doesn't make any moral sense. I haven't seen any on efficiency grounds.
Not necessarily. This assumes Democrats outside those states have no leverage in the redesign or if they do, they don't use it well. And that the voters in Mississippi and Oklahoma have no say or don't care whether people in their state can't get medical care.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/welfare-reform-tanf/how-states-use-federal-and-state-funds-under-the-tanf-block-grant
Conceptually I can sort of agree to the idea but then we look at how tanf funds are spent and it's not great. Giving states a lot of leeway to redesign medicaid seems genuinely dangerous to the health and wellbeing of its recipients.
An intelligent redesign of Medicaid would be worthwhile. The most recent expansion cost over $5 million per statistical life saved. That’s far more than it’s beneficiaries earn in a lifetime. Devoting over a lifetime of earnings to saving a life is pretty ridiculous.
Value of a Statistical Life is still well above $5m. DOT has it at $13.2m.
Wages and income are not the only value of one’s life.
On another note, the government can’t use the statistical value of life years or age adjusted VSL is because AARP will riot.
I reject wretched safetyism and strongly disagree with the DOT bureaucrats. If you really value a life that much, you’ll squeeze out quite a bit of consumption for safety type stuff and rarely have any fun.
I don’t see your point. The only implication from your statements are that you think VSL should be tied to a person’s earnings and that a number lower than most government VSLs is too high.
Do you think India should adopt $13.2 million as their VSL? That would be absurd, they are too poor to do that. If they tried, they would have to adopt a western quality health care and sanitation system overnight, all other social goals would be deprioritized. There has to be a sensible discussion about how much of the economy ought to be given over to safety and how much to enjoyment.
“ Do you think India should adopt $13.2 million as their VSL?”
This is nowhere implied or suggested. The follow on statement also suggests that you haven’t read up on how VSL is constructed or used. You kind of sound like Thomas Friedman with that vague appeal to sensibility.
Do you or do you not believe the value of a person’s life is measured by the (market) income they generate? That is what you suggested in your initial statement.
"An intelligent redesign"
As usual with GOP legislative policy, all rounds lead back to tax cuts. You're right in theory that an "intelligent design" of Medicaid could be good thing. But I have serious doubts that's what's going to happen based on what we know. Block granting Medicaid in the manner Paul Ryan would want (and seems to be what Project 2025 wants) would amount to massive decrease in Medicaid funding over time. Also, devil is in the details. How much of that block granting would likely result in gobs of money to be used towards churches. SCOTUS has already shown itself to be astonishingly deferential to church interests. A ruling noting that states are allowed to funnel Medicaid dollars to churches seems astonishingly likely to me.
My model for this prediction is school vouchers. In theory, I actually think school choice has merit...in theory. In practice? Yeah after Betsy DeVos I jumped off that train because I realized "school choice" was never about improving outcomes for poor kids it was about cultural war crap (so allowing religious schools to get government money) and back door tax cuts. Don't believe me on the latter? https://itep.org/tax-avoidance-fuels-school-vouchers-privatization-efforts/. And regarding money for religious schools, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/03/tax-dollars-religious-schools/
Just everything we see regarding how school vouchers is actually implemented just seems like an absolute blueprint for Medicaid.
Do you have the balls to tell Debbie no chemo for her breast cancer? I think you, like many voters, talk a good game but have no tolerance for actual implementation.
Chemo for breast cancer — especially if one was healthy before— is pretty high efficacy and not horribly costly. It would clear the bar of $500k/statistical life.
I totally have the balls to tell alcoholics no expensive treatments for cirrhosis.
Alcoholics are already ineligible for liver transplants.
No but there are other treatments. There are also really expensive procedures for the obese, for people with mobility issues who would be mobile if they had exercised, etc
Vitamin O will take care of the obese.
What if they're active in AA and have been sober for five years?
Still not worth $13 million.
What if the $13 million specifically came from your political enemies?
Are there no benefits to healthcare other than lives saved? Or is all of that being included in the price you quote?
VSL includes litigation, labor market, insurance, medical, and non-market costs of a life.
Yes. For example, if you look at a list of the largest integrated health systems by revenue, #20 last year had revenue of $10.5 billion. Many of these are ostensibly nonprofit institutions. What are they doing for the poor to earn their nonprofit status? Not a lot.
They have high fixed costs and sometimes struggle with that, such as when demand and revenue dipped during the pandemic and then they were hit with inflation on top of that. On their own they could do a bit more. With different types of government programs and concentrated help, they could do a lot more, possibly better and more cost-effectively than the way Medicaid currently filters and disperses its money though the system. But none of those possibilities are easy or feasible to try when everything has to pass through the needle of a single agency veto point in Washington, and even broaching the subject brings down vicious knee jerk opposition from one party, for no clearly articulated reason except the perceived threat to the status quo.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/47-health-systems-ranked-by-annual-revenue.html
Ah, intelligent design. Good times. Coming soon to a school near you.
If we have block grants, some centrist governor will figure out how to squeeze a dollar.
Yeah, but we’ve talked about this in a previous thread. In a world with EMTALA, Medicaid doesn’t really save many lives because, well, EMTALA. Medicaid ensures doctors and hospitals get paid for the work they’re already doing, allows people to use preventative care and prescriptions (improved quality of life, but not really quantity, because the ER will still treat and stabilize them when they get sick either way), and prevents medical bankruptcy. Calculating the cost of Medicaid dividing by the marginal life saved with the program, given EMTALA, is designed specifically to make Medicaid look ineffective. Medicaid is plenty effective, that’s just the wrong metric.
I mean in the end no program saves lives, nobody makes it out alive!
One of Medicaid's big problems is wealthier states simply have the tax base to produce greater spending for matching grants. This is producing a lot of additional spending growth. Even when controlling for expansion states, this story plays out where we're getting federal spending transfers to richer states on net without a ton in the way of strictly anti-poverty policy to defend this.
MI's senior fellow Chris Pope has written an excellent piece on how to keep Medicaid focused on its key goals and ultimately set it on a path to federalize [1], and he has quite a bit in further research to back it up. Leaving it to the states is neither the most fiscally conservative nor most progressive anti-poverty approach. We already have enough of these shenanigans with TANF.
[1]https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4022852-a-better-way-to-rein-in-medicaid/
The ACA was in fact a very middle of the road strategy to tackle the problems with the way we fund and deliver healthcare in the United States and there is a lot that could be done to build on its success and improve its weaknesses but that requires two functioning parties and since 2008 we have had one party interested in governing and making incremental progress and one simply determined to block progress in order to gain power and cut taxes. I don’t know how deep the impacts of a GOP trifecta will be but I know that poor people will feel them the hardest and it makes me nauseous to watch those who claim to care about the most vulnerable simply shrug and look forward to reviving their resistance focused vibes.
You’re just a mouthpiece rationalizing pure evil here
Sigh. Part of this is the fault of the out of touch elitism of the Democratic Party. Part of this is the result of a moral failing of the American people.
People have childish expectations that things will be taken care of without cost and easily, and then ignore the promises made by those they empower.
You left out the utter cravenness, cowardice, and failure to uphold their constitutional oaths of elected Republicans.
Not to mention the cowardice and self interest of elected Democrats. Time to vote third party.
You saw the news too.
Sigh.
"People have childish expectations that things will be taken care of without cost and easily"
I think people have a poor understanding of the Constitution, the governing document they purportedly hold in such high-esteem. The president is not a king and historically did not (and should not and was not even primarily designated to) have had much power to unilaterally enact any domestic agenda. I still, STILL have to have arguments with people who are unhappy about their tax bill and blame it on the president. And I still, STILL can't believe people think the president has any control over the economy, especially their tiny, sliver microcosm of the economy that they occupy.
I actually see a connection between this "expectation that things will be taken care of without cost and easily" view of politics and those who are deeply religious - especially in religions of the monotheistic variety. That is, of course, what the Abrahamic religions do well: simplify everything into one deity to which they can foist all their hopes and troubles on. It seems easy to see how if they ascribe this view to the nature of the universe, they think the governing of the country can be simplified in a similar way.
I find it especially perplexing that the world outside of the US doesn’t seem to exist to many Americans. Most Western countries have way worse inflation than the US, yet somehow inflation is Biden’s fault. Europeans are irrational in different ways but at least they don’t think that their leaders are omnipotent.
Fantastical policy agendas seem to me to be the original sin of a lot of modern authoritarianism. The specific variety of snake oil peddled varies across time and geography but whatever it is, when it doesn't work, the salesmen feel forced to look for scapegoats and/or attack the media to prevent it from reporting the disappointing reality, and then if/when that doesn't work, the constitutional order may be the next target.
You saw it in Britain with Brexit (supposedly obstructive judges labelled 'enemies of the people' for example) and you see it in Israel with the failures of its security policy covered up by attacks on the media, academia and protesters.
One reason my p(breakdown of American democracy) is higher than Matt's 10-15% is precisely because the Republican policy agenda doesn't add up. Matt himself has already argued that it leads inevitably to slow growth and high inflation.
So if they're successful in doing half of what they promise, the next Trump administration will quickly become very unpopular and Democratic wins in 2026/2028 will start to look highly likely.
Why should anyone be optimistic about how they'll handle that?
Nobody's policy agenda adds up right now, and it almost never has! Politicians get elected making promises they can't keep and then when the public figures that out, they boot them.
It's kind of interesting Matt has written the same article about three times and hasn't once listed what the Democratic party's realistic Congressional agenda is to reduce cost of living and address the deficit with a narrow majority. I'm not saying he shouldn't criticize Trump or Republicans, he absolutely has the right to do so, but it would be cool to know his predictions for what Democrats will pass and how it will avoid the errors of ARPA stimulus or get us to supply-side liberalism, etc.
He's made the point that Republicans are much more likely to have a trifecta and so its more relevant to talk about what they will do. Plus, its a lot easier to bash Republicans when you're a Democrat and its election time.
The expected value of a Republican trifecta is: The value of a R trifecta - the value of a D trifecta. If he never talks about the value of a D trifecta, then we can't know how bad an R tri actually is.
Say the Democratic party has a negative expected value of -5, and the Rs are -7. The actual difference between them is just 2.
Well, much higher taxes on the rich, to begin with.
The amount of revenue currently suggested via tax increases on the wealthy and the amount of revenue needed to pay for Biden/Democrats proposed spending is so disparate its hard to take much more seriously than Trump's proposal to pay for the federal budget with tariffs.
Plus, just as the DBCFT died with retail lobbying before it was ever included in the TCJA (suggesting the GOP is not eager for broad VAT-style consumption tax increases or tariffs that have similar incidence if not the same escalatory problem), the legislative record of 2021-2023 suggests Democrats do not have a coalition to increase upper bracket income taxes like Bill Clinton did. Doesn't matter how many times the White House proposes it!
Exactly right. If the GOP won't moderate on its draconian fiscal agenda, there ends up being a certain logic to an authoritarian power grab as the best way to square this circle.
Brexit was the work of authoritarians?
The point is they got (more) authoritarian once they had to deliver it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_British_prorogation_controversy
To be fair, the ultra-Remainers also deserve a lot of the blame for Brexit going as badly as it did. They never had much of a strategy beyond refusing to believe that the Leave vote had really happened, and some of their own tactics (holding a second referendum to correct the results of the first one) were undemocratic too.
If Labour had accepted a sensible compromise (leaving the EU and ending free migration, but keeping free trade in place) they could have given Theresa May the votes she needed to get her "backstopped" Brexit deal through, and the economic impact would have been marginal.
What Labour actually did has paid off in the medium term, because everyone now blames the Tories for what happened and they've been clobbered at the last election. But it doesn't give you much confidence in how they'll approach their own challenges in government.
(And before anyone puts all the blame on Jeremy Corbyn: Keir Starmer was Labour's point man on Brexit, so this was his call as well)
Also: due to my excessive facebooking about Brexit while it was happening, I made an important discovery about the UK constitution! I now know how to save British democracy the next time something like this happens.
When Parliament is maliciously prorogued, the King can recall it by abdicating, which is one of the few sovereign powers the monarch hasn't handed over to the government of the day. Any vacancy of the throne, whether by death or abdication, constitutes "the demise of the Crown" and triggers the Succession to the Crown Act 1707, automatically calling Parliament back into session:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_to_the_Crown_Act_1707
(HM King Charles please note)
Wasn’t the Leave vote influenced by the Russkies
To some extent, yes. But I think overemphasizing that angle was also something the Remainers did to avoid looking at their own mistakes: a problem that exists in the US as well
Doesn’t matter, for if the Russians are for something it’s practically guaranteed to be wrong
Lol this is essentially unhinged British liberals whining about the fact that their cockamamie scheme to stop Brexit did not work.
Hi everyone!
I'm traveling and I have a bunch of work to catch up on, so I'm just going to leave this fly-by comment here.
Thank you, Matt Y, for writing about the concrete policy implications of GOP getting the trifecta. I think the p-word (rhymes with "shmivilege") has been overused badly and I hate using it, but based on the results of the recent SB user survey, a lot of us here are, uh, sheltered from the immediate effects of, say, a Medicaid cut. It's good for us to be told of these things!
But I hate, hate, hate the doom and gloom of "welp, Trump is unbeatable now because he's a martyr, and Biden is senile and stubborn and refuses to step down, so we are DOOMED to defeat, whaddya gonna do."
NO! F*** that! I am not going to just shrug my shoulders and say, that's it, it's all over! It may well be, but there's wayyyy too much self-fulfilling prophecy going on right now. We have to fight for our side to prevail! (Fight NONVIOLENTLY, in case that needed to be said, Jesus.)
My fellow lefty/liberal/Never Trumper Americans, we have to do what we can to help the Democrats win the election! If you're feeling hopeless, recite the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear, watch Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate in "The Return of the King," listen to some badass epic music (I'm partial to this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc6APU8wum0 or do whatever else works for you, and then make a plan! Write letters to voters, donate if you can, canvass if you're in a swing district.
Once I'm back from my travels, I'll sign up to canvass for Dave Min in CA-47. And I'm writing letters to voters with Vote Forward; I can do that regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.
VOTES FOR THE VOTE GOD! TURNOUT FOR THE TURNOUT THRONE!
I regret that I have but one heart to give this post.
Thank you for pledging to engage with politics in an affirmative way. I would imagine, or at least hope, that many of us on this ‘Stack will do likewise this fall.
I will again be serving as an election precinct clerk or supervisor, not far from CA-47 territory, in fact. Given recent events I am realizing this may well be a tense day. I hope it is nothing more.
I will also look to donate to or serve a local campaign as my work schedule allows.
Well yes but actually no. If Biden is at the top of the ticket we are very much doomed to defeat (he’s behind the polls and every presidential poll with Trump running for president has *underestimated* Trump’s support).
Frankly, unless they replace Biden, that time spent trying to get Biden elected would be better spent on figuring out how to get a UK or EU passport.
I did not become a US citizen just so I could run away like a b*tch the moment Agent Orange is reelected. I’m staying.
Neither Matt nor Nate Silver understand the selfish cunning of Congressional Democrats. Yes, Biden is likely to lose, but his numbers have been stable in the polls. They only ticked down a couple points after Biden showed the world how poorly he functions on a bad night. Biden will do well enough for most safe seat Democrats to keep their seats.
An open convention is riskier for Democratic incumbents. The chosen candidate might flop completely and get wiped out. Whoever actually forces Biden out will make a lot of enemies. The selfishly rational play for Congressional Ds is to let Biden lose by 2-4 points, then ride thermostatic reaction against Trump to majorities in 2026, while keeping their seats, their staffs and the perquisites of office the whole time. Also, the less money donors give to Biden, the more the DCCC will pocket. The more afraid moderates become of Trump winning, the better the chances moderates split their tickets and vote for Democratic congressional candidates.
Many swing seat Democrats who need a good cycle to stay in office have called on Biden to step aside. This is why AOC has supported Biden but Golden and Perez want him out. It’s 90% selfish calculation.
I don't think the selfish cunning is any secret. Many Dems have leaked to the press that this is their strategy and are already planning on a second Trump presidency.
Evil fucks
Nate’s article (in which he said prediction markets underestimated the odds of Biden dropping out) talked about “mutually assured destruction” and assumed Dems would continue to escalate until Biden exited. That’s one of Nate’s worst takes in a while.
Matt has called out Congressional Democrats on twitter but not really on his substack. Todays article- fretting about a landslide- probably overstates the downside of keeping Biden and clearly implies congressional Ds could get their oxen gored if they stick with Biden. He’s never written “cautious congressional Democrats might maximize their own advantage through keeping Biden on the ticket” on this blog, and that’s become an elephant in the room.
It’s hard to see how the chosen candidate could “flop completely” given the stakes—worst case scenario looks like getting the the same number of votes as Biden, with different people not voting or voting third party. The reason Biden’s polls only ticked down a couple of points is that most (maybe all?) of his voters, given a choice between his corpse and Donald Trump, would go with the dead guy.
Harris might piss off the white working class to an extent not previously seen. I doubt Latino men can stomach her either.
But even if Harris performs as well as Biden, there is the personal risk of leading a mutiny.
It’s more of an intervention—everyone in the party was prepared to support him if he was able to run. Then he got up in front of 50 million people and proved he wasn’t.
If daddy is drinking too much, the kid who speaks up first often gets beaten. It’s only if he goes to rehab that the first mover wins. Biden is drunk on his own importance and those who challenge it are taking risks
Sad but true
I’m also beginning to wonder if the reason why we aren’t hearing more support for the obvious replacement choice for Biden- Harris- is that she herself has put the word out she doesn’t want it? Has she calculated that 2024 is already over and she’ll have a better shot in 2028 if she’s at the bottom of the 2024 ticket not the top?
I think it's just too risky for her to be seen as undercutting the President as the Vice. Her best argument is being the legitimate heir, which gets undermined if she looks disloyal.
But without a champion the dump Biden movement is completely dependent on Biden voluntarily stepping aside.
With or without a champion, the only way Biden can be replaced is if he voluntarily steps aside. He is the sole decision-maker under the rules. This is basically about what can persuade Joe to put his party before himself.
>sole decision-maker under the rules<
Not so.
*Practically* speaking, it would be very difficult to remove him as the nominee against his will, sure. And it might well be a disaster if he were to fight it until the bitter end. And I acknowledge that his delegates refusing to nominate him is a stretch. But if he's behind by 10-12 points in mid August AND he's suffered additional, fairly bad gaffes?
But with respect to the RULES, delegates can exercise the "good conscience" loophole. I think it's super unlikely it'll come to that. But I don't think it's near impossible that the *threat* of such a development is what could finally convince the president to step down. Especially if the threat were delivered quietly by people with names like Chuck, Nancy and Hakeem.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/biden-has-a-weak-hand
If Biden wants the nomination, he gets the nomination.
This really isn't very hard to understand.
But aren't Biden delegates chosen by Biden's people? Are they going to do what Chuck, Nancy and Hakeem want them to do?
The willingness of Biden delegates to invoke the Good Conscience clause would obviously be a critical question in the event Biden isn't willing to go (which as of now is still the case). I'm hearing his political operation has been phoning them to shore up support. I hope it doesn't come to that, since it's seems it might well be a long shot. On the other hand, if a month from now he's (even more) obviously on his way to a loss—complete with damaging, additional gaffes and an ever-growing poll lead for Trump—and calls for him to step down have grown to a crescendo? Who knows? AFAIK only 51% of his delegates have to invoke the clause.
Look, if I were a betting man I'd bet that (1) Biden remains the nominee, and (2) Trump wins the election. But we're in an unsettled time. And I do expect Trump's numbers are going to look very strong very soon. Which means Biden's are going to look very weak very soon. I don't think he's a lock to be the nominee.
You’re definitely correct about that- but others could be advocating for her, and it doesn’t seem like that’s happening and I’m trying to understand why.
It's hard for me to conceive of an argument someone could make for Harris having a better chance in 2028.
If she goes down with the ship as Biden’s VP, she has no chance.
No strategy gives her more than a 40% chance this year or more than a 10% chance in ‘28. To win in 28 Biden has to win this year and things have to go well for Harris.
Harris is only becoming President if Biden leaves office.
Do you mean she can't beat Trump no matter what? Or do you mean she might be able beat Trump running as the incumbent president.
I think she's more likely to beat Trump as POTUS than as VPOTUS.
It means that if Biden resigns and she is VP, she is president. If she runs while Biden is POTUS, then that will be a mess. If she is VP until 2028, then someone else might win the primary (and that someone will be younger.)
>It means that if Biden resigns and she is VP, she is president.<
Yes. That's how the constitution works! But, do you think she could win the election as POTUS, or would that also be a mess?
If, miracle of miracles, Biden bows out, my personal preference would be for him to (1) remain in office until the nominee is decided, and then (2) resign the presidency if Harris is the nominee.
It would be highly awkward for him to resign if Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer is the nominee. I have zero idea if, in stepping aside from the race, it's plausible he'd resign the White House (maybe it isn't). But if he does go that route, he really can't do so unless/until Harris is assured the nomination (maybe she would be absolutely assured of being nominated for the top of the ticket if she's already POTUS, but I'd want to be 100% sure).
I'm not sure Harris would "be a mess" if she's running for president this fall and serving as Vice President. But I do think a "clean break" from Biden's highly tarnished brand will be a heavy lift. Trump obviously will continue to campaign against BIDEN-Harris as long as Joe is in the White House.
Biden is able to be President until Jan. 20, 2025. He should keep that job. If Harris is the nominee then she can spend 24/7 running the most vigorous campaign possible.
The idea that she could mount a campaign *at the same time* she is learning to be President is, forgive me, nuts.
(1) It's possible Harris doesn't want it. I doubt it, but it's possible. (Surely it's a competitive race with a reset. Trump's pretty widely disliked).
(2) But in any event she'll take the nomination if it's there. Why wait until you're pushing into your mid 60s? It's highly doubtful she'd be a lot more viable in 2028—when she'd have to fight for the nomination—than in 2024, when she might get it by default.
While I more or less share Yglesias's doomerism with respect to Biden's chances, I don't see Harris-Beshear or Harris-Cooper (or whoever) being anything but a pretty compelling ticket (I'd probably go with Whitmer if I were the Vice President—echoes of '92).
"An open convention is riskier for Democratic incumbents. The chosen candidate might flop completely and get wiped out."
What I really haven't heard people talking about is why the replacement candidate who is not Kamala Harris wants to put themselves out there and probably lose to Trump, rather than taking their time and building up to be a candidate in 2028 when the backlash to Trump will be in full swing? Isn't the percentage play to wait this one out, rather than try an ill-timed, rushed candidacy?
If I were a Democratic presidential hopeful, I'd think my odds against Trump and a short campaign where no one has time to build a strong hatred machine and I can skip the small-differences dumb arguments of a primary seems pretty attractive for my chances. I personally think that long campaigns are actually a huge detriment to candidates' popularity.
I wonder if the logic of the squad (and far left in general) goes even further. If you really want to reshape government (and society), you need a “revolution”* (either Bernie style or non-democratic style). So, you want things to be as bad as possible to increase the odds of getting a non-moderate, left-wing candidate elected in 2028 (or even for a non-democratic revolution). Keeping Biden in the race increases the chance of Trump winning, which increases the chances of things getting really bad, which increases the chances that the far left gets to do their thing… I hope that’s not the logic, but maybe it is.
* At least in theory; revolutions rarely work.
It's definitely the logic among some (self-styled?) radicals and far-leftists. Maybe far-rightists too, I have less awareness of what they say.
It's called accelerationism. The status quo will lead to disaster, they say, and it can only be fixed by revolution. Since we don't have popular support for the revolution now, what we need is for the disasters to happen quickly, so a critical number of people find the status quo intolerable and will join us in tearing it all down.
Personally, I'm adamantly opposed to accelerationism. Very skeptical of revolutions -- their track record is not great, and revolutions that succeed in gaining power often result in tyranny and mass death. I'm also against making things worse on purpose (shocking, i know). I hope no one with any real political power is intentionally trying to do the one thing in service of the other.
Yeah, in my dark imaginings I believe this is why Bernie and AOC endorsed Biden recently. To "enhance the contradictions." The worse the Biden defeat, the better for their cause.
Like the German Communist Party in 1929 refusing to cooperate with the center-left, no contradictions were heightened post-Hitler and they were all sent to the death camps.
Is AOC more interested in revolution or in climbing the greasy poll?
Aoc may be interested in climbing. I have doubts that the others are interested in climbing.
Fair. If so sincerely want outcomes outside the mainstream of public opinion, heightening the constructions is shrewd.
Not sure how you can write this post without talking about the courts and judges. The overturning of Chevron is going to be huge here.
The dream of donor class, the reason they’ve bribed Clarence Thomas to stay on the court, is to completely dismantle environmental regulation and labor protection. I really think it’s gone under the radar a) that’s already happened to an extent and b) will be supercharged with recent SCOTUS decisions.
For those of you looking at this half glass full because Matt has spent a lot of his time lately bashing lefty NIMBYs and lefty non-profits and that maybe GOP will make needed to changes that will lead to more housing and more green tech investment I would seriously take a closer look at the animating spirit behind Trumpism. Go look at polling on housing; GOP voters are on average more NIMBY than left leaning voters. It’s just that in places like SF and NYC (though not necessarily the suburbs) it’s left NIMBYs who are the problem. The GOP NIMBY is more of the “protect the housewives in the suburbs” culture war nonsense.
As for investment in green tech. Go look at project 2025 and see how it wants to overturn the “Green New Deal”. I admonished Noah Smith for being too nice to the GOP platform in part by noting that talk of repealing the Green New Deal is completely looney tunes. But it’s perfectly in keeping with the “never give up you gas stoves”, “the libs want to ban hamburgers” and maybe most important “gas guzzling cars are what true manly man man man drive”. Think Matt is really underrating the possibility IRA is overturned as some cultural war bone to throw to their Newsmax/Fox News watching base.
I have yet to understand why someone would mourn the loss of Chevron while also recognizing that Trump is likely to be the next President. Curbing executive power is particularly good when a bad person is probably going to be wielding that power.
Note: I don't subscribe the outcome-based constitutional analysis I reference above. I think Chevron falling is a better reading of the APA. The SCOTUS majority opinion overturning Chevron is compelling, and much more persuasive than the dissent.
My biggest problem with the death of Chevron is the plausible increase in litigation and the lack of judicial capacity for to resolve said litigation.
This is my point really. A trifecta or at the very least a GOP controlled senate (especially one with a 4-5 seat majority) is going to nominate only the most ideologically "pure" judges.
As Matt has noted a number of times, law school grads are overwhelmingly Democrats. And as I have noted here a few times (and Matt noted) religious attendance has dropped tremendously over the past 20 years which means like all orgs that lose members the ones who remain tend to be more extreme. It's a toxic stew for having a lot of lunatic GOP judges who are also at the same time likely woefully underprepared for the job.
There are a lot more Matthew Kascymarks out there and 5th circuit clearly sees itself as FedSoc foot soldiers first and judges second. Overturning Chevron is all about empowering these people.
I just genuinely am so disappointed that after all this time there are too many centrist and left of center people who still "trust" that right wing judges will actually follow precedent and procedure despite massive evidence to the contrary.
I can't wait for the courts to weigh in on whether EPA's limit of 15 parts per billion for lead contamination is correct or if it should be 50 parts per billion, per plaintiff's claims.
I would so trust judges' ability to decide those levels.
That's not what Chevron did and anyone even vaguely interested in the topic knows that.
I think something that gets lost in the panic about Chevron is that it does not force judges to second-guess agency experts, they are just no longer forced to defer to agency experts. I hope that the result is some really bad ideologically-driven, corrupt-looking decisions and really gross litigation that creates sufficient backlash to cause (a future) congress to pass better laws instead of outsourcing everything to the executive branch. Of course, I am also cynical and an unrepentant optimist.
I think “write better laws” is a bit of a daft way to say Chevron doesn’t matter. Congress always could add more detail on a regulation and still can. But writing a statute that says “maintain drinkable water” and having agency experts interpret that is far better than “keep arsenic levels below x parts per million and pig shit below y parts”. If Congress attempts to fill that breach, there are only two realistic outcomes. 1. It simply does not know what it’s doing or 2. The arsenic polluters and pig farmers lobby for meaningless limits because they have a huge concentrated interest in the outcome compared to a less salient interest from the public more generally. With no Chevron now we can let untrained and unelected judges do that. That is the worst of the options.
1) There is no reason that the expertise at the agencies cannot be brought to Congress!
2) The problem with agencies is that Congress says keep the water clean for drinking and agencies say "that means we need to regulate soda because it has water and people drink it" when that is clearly NOT what was intended by Congress.
You're right that Congress can upgrade its expertise. And will need to do so. But as I see it, institutional architecture makes the executive branch a natural place to at least do SOME of the fine-tuning of the implementation of enactments. And that's because novel situations and unforeseen conditions frequently arise—this is inevitable even if Congress could staff itself with an army of Einsteins.
Executive branch offices that can fine-tune on the fly in response to the exigencies of the real world help us govern effectively. Congress's problem isn't lack of experts: its problem is that legislating is hard and often slow, and it is unlikely to be able to increase the *tempo* of legislation to replace the executive branch rule-making we've gotten used to.
These are institutional muscles that have atrophied because it's been easier to hand all of it off to the executive branch to figure out. Plus they can blame bureaucrats instead of being responsible!
But if you actually want Congress to be able to legislate, you need to remove this crutch and require they do their job. You want a body of government that doesn't have the expertise to provide discrete instructions to an agency to pass a law that dramatically changes the status quo in the country?
I don't mean pass laws with more specific language, I mean clarify the role of experts and the structure and purpose of agencies. A lot of what we fight about today is because people were choking on smog and rivers were catching fire in the 60's and 70's, so we passed laws and created agencies to deal with those problems.
Congress has amended the Clean Air Act many times to keep up with modern sources of air pollution, but they dither on really important issues stemming from global warming that don't seem to fall under the rubric of "clean air". My sincere hope is that empowering the judiciary to effectively (re)write regulations will lead to public pressure on Congress to settle some of these important regulatory matters for the coming decades.
I am not convinced agency experts always do a better job. For example, a few years back, people were losing their minds about the Trump administration loosening rules on mercury pollution in the air, which otherwise was going to cost companies millions of dollars to address. I actually read the EPA report justifying the rule and found the causal chain of evidence *incredibly* weak. I don't recall all the details but essentially it was that a tiny additional amount of mercury was going to get into the soil, leach into the freshwater, be taken up by fish, be eaten by mostly poor pregnant women who catch their own, and cause a decrease in the IQ of their babies by a few thousandths of a point. These slightly dumber kids would grow up and be worse at their jobs, thus lowering their economic value. It was only by aggregating these otherwise imperceptible effects over thousands of people that they could claim with a straight face that the economic cost of the rule was less than the impact of the pollution.
Now maybe you say "we're a rich country and we shouldn't have to deal with any mercury getting into the environment, even if the risk is practically nil", and I would consider that argument. But don't claim otherwise.
I don't have super-strong priors about Chevron, but if I were designing a constitutional order from scratch, I would absolutely not have a bunch of law school graduates in robes making judgements about 'the causal chain of evidence' in mercury reports or whatever. That's just a terrible system. (When was the last science class these guys took? Senior year of high school?)
Judges are not Mentats who will wisely know the right course of action on literally any subject. Feels like we're drifting in that direction by appointing the judiciary to be the 'mercury evidence measurers' or whatever. I have a lot of concerns about the over-judicialization of the US. I'd rather see agencies have more stability than and less turnover every four years
Chevron isn't about the causal chain of evidence in mercury reports. Courts will not be ruling on object level policy questions.
The best way is for Congress to make the determination. I'm not sure there is a second-best way. But I don't think any of us know how this will play out. My suspicion is that we'll hardly notice any difference.
>it does not force judges to second-guess agency experts<
Correct. Elite lawyers will do the heavy lifting on that part.
No, they will not be. Chevron and agency law is not about the object level of the policy question; it's about what the agencies are authorized to do by law, and whether they get to stretch their jurisdiction to all the issues they want to regulate whether or not Congress actually gave them that authority.
Also, the decision overturning Chevron wasn't the big admin law decision of this term. Chevron "deference" was never as clear or stable or impactful as people make it out to be.
The more impactful admin law decision is likely to be Corner Post -- which interpreted the meaning of the word "accrue" in the APA statute of limitations for challenging agency regulations that don't comply with law. And it resolved the issue by concluding that "accrue" in this statute of limitations means the same thing that any ordinary litigator across the country would ordinarily understand that word to mean in any other statute of limitations.
Loper Bright and Corner Post actually work in synergy; Loper Bright restricts agency jurisdiction-stretching, and Corner Post allows even old regulations which had been previously blessed (either tacitly or actively) under the old Chevron regime to be brought back into the courts when a new business suffers harm because of them.
"Not sure how you can write this post without talking about the courts and judges."
As much as I enjoy Matt's writing overall, his, "LOL! Courts don't matter!" schtick is arguably his actual worst take, even more so than supporting the Iraq War or thinking that there's nothing wrong with spoilers.
Is Matt's take "courts don't matter", or is his take "courts just make stuff up"? It's my understanding that he's more in the latter camp, and I think if he was in the former, he wouldn't be strongly calling for Sotomayor to retire. I do wish, and I think we've concurred on this before, that Matt would put a little more effort into understanding the common and rising legal interpretations out there, even if does think it's made up stuff.
I think "courts just make stuff up" for most practical purposes turns into "courts don't matter." E.g., he's never tried to talk about the First Amendment implications of banning TikTok when he mentions doing it.
He said the federal judiciary was the real Cathedral!
I think his point is that what the courts do matters very much, but that it matters illegitimately.
The way I interpreted Matt's take on the TikTok ban (and as you know, that frustrated me as much as it did you) is that they should just give it a shot, and if the courts strike it down then we're no worse off--but maybe they'll make something up that will uphold it. To me, "courts don't matter" implies endorsing "John Roberts has made his decision, now let him enforce it" style ignoring tactics.
How are the end of Chevron deference and YIMBYism connected? This is about federal, not state or local law. The impact on housing would be pretty much zilch. So anyone who thinks the Raimundo case is good for YIMBYism needs a reality check.
I guess it's not the most important thing in the world, but I'm surprised Matt didn't mention that one of the first things a Republican trifecta would do is cut IRS funding, which would allow rich people to cheat on their taxes without penalty
If we want automatic stabilizers in place for the next recession, putting them in during a time when spending cuts are needed might get bipartisan support.
zero comments so far on legal immigration cuts, the most important policy on this list
For instance, this Cruz-Sessions bill (10yrs of work outside the US before eligible for H1B, no OPT) would ~completely destroy skilled immigration. Seems very bad.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/02/01/the-story-of-how-trump-officials-tried-to-end-h-1b-visas/
I would simply not run a Presidential candidate who polls below other Democrats
It's normally the best strategy to nominate the candidate who is most likely to win the election and be best suited to govern.
Don’t you see Ben? Giving Trump a candidate more likely to beat him than Biden is HELPING TRUMP
Democrats are getting discourse'd out of their "democracy is on the ballot" message, which lots of people on the left disliked because it had no *policy* stakes. All that unpopular Ryan budget stuff, just not in the mix, bc you're talking about Jan. 6 instead.
I do wonder if that changes, even though Democrats (inc. the Biden campaign) resent being told that their attacks on Trump are retroactively Dangerous and they shouldn't be mean to him.
Not just discoursed out of the democracy message—testing shows it's not as effective as other stuff like abortion. That said, I don't think that means the message isn't true. Trump is in fact a thr