There Ain't Much Policy in Politics Anymore
Without policy, politics is about nothing more than power.
When I was in undergrad back in the late 1990s, many of my fellow political science majors (myself included) were wannabe policy wonks. Mind you, this was the Clinton-Gingrich era, so it was not necessarily a time of bipartisan harmony that generated reams of groundbreaking legislation, and the “horse race” political narrative still prevailed in the media’s coverage of politics. Still, political conversations often turned into deep dives into policy, and politicos needed to be able to prove their policy chops if they hoped to be taken seriously by others. It was possible to gain the upper hand in an argument by convincing others you had a better plan for addressing a problem than someone else.
As students, we took the American political system for granted. We were less interested in the behavior of government actors or government as an institution than we were in the outcomes of government action. Congress was a routing system. Voters, even politicians, were persuadable (or at least malleable). Interest groups generated arguments our arguments would either draw facts from or need to refute. Our mission as political science students—what drew many of us to the major in the first place—was to come up with solutions to the problems government dealt with. We wrote papers on how to reduce crime, how to improve the educational system, how to save Social Security, how to bring an end to the war in the former Yugoslavia, how to reduce factory emissions.
These days, policy doesn’t matter much in politics. Consider the issue of climate change: Millennia-years-old glaciers are collapsing, much of the American West is drying up and turning into a tinder box, the power grid in Texas is on the verge of collapse, the shoreline is creeping into Louisiana and and the streets of Miami, Greenland’s ice cap is melting at a rate of 6 billion tons of water per day, and Europe is a sauna, but while scientists and policymakers have been formulating solutions to this problem for decades, there is no hope any of it becomes law here in the United States, where most Republicans believe policies aimed at reducing the effects of global climate change would not only harm more than help the United States but would more likely harm/make no difference than it would help the environment. The number of Republicans who simply consider global warming a serious problem has actually dropped ten points over the past seven years:
Study it all you want, write up as many proposals to address the problem as you like, but they’ll just sit in binders on shelves gathering cobwebs until they get washed out to sea by rising ocean levels.
Or consider the buffet of proposals that constituted the Build Back Better plan, specifically the American Families Plan, which included provisions for more affordable childcare and prescription drug coverage, free pre-kindergarten and community college, paid family and medical leave, a child tax credit, tax reform, investing in green energy, and strengthening Obamacare. No Republican supported it, which, given its $6 trillion price tag, was expected. Fair enough. But as it got whittled down to satisfy moderate Democrats, Republicans still declined to sign-on to it. When a Republican like Mitt Romney suggested pulling individual items like the child tax credit out of the package so they could be passed on their own merits, he couldn’t find ten Republicans willing to break the filibuster to get them across the finish line. After congressional Democrats and President Biden essentially told Democratic hold-out Joe Manchin they would pass whatever scraps of the program he approved of, Manchin spent six months working on a bill he finally decided he needed to kill. It was a cruel fate for those who had spent months and years of their lives trying to get the policy right. Even when their policy preference came down to “whatever the senator from West Virginia will vote for,” it just didn’t matter.
Now I should be careful saying policy doesn’t matter anymore in American politics. It still matters in administrative agencies, which actually have to find ways to perform tasks assigned to them by elected officials or resolve problems in areas they oversee. It also still matters at the state and local level, where politicians are often judged by how well they deliver on issues that directly affect the day-to-day lives of their citizens. Even there, though, we’re seeing politicians drift further from policymaking to, in the case of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, straight-up trolling. (Here’s the liberal and conservative critique of the governor along those lines.) At the local level we’re seeing members of school boards and election commissions less concerned with the nitty gritty details of school bus routes, math curricula, counting votes, and staffing polling places than in channeling grievance.
And it’s not as though policy is never a concern of Congress. Last year, Congress passed an infrastructure bill containing provisions on transportation, energy, and broadband communications policy. More recently, they passed a (rather small-scale) gun control bill. More often than not, though, a big piece of legislation containing a lot of policy (i.e., an annual appropriations bill) only gets through Congress if it doesn’t draw a lot of public scrutiny to it, if it preserves the status quo to avoid revisiting policy, or if it’s passed in response to an emergency (like the pandemic) or a crisis (like the pending bill to revise the Electoral Count Act.) What you rarely see anymore these days is Congress identifying a public problem (of which there are many) and passing a bill aimed at addressing that problem. That sort of bill is D.O.A. and we all know it. Trying to influence Congress with a good, sound policy proposal is like trying to train a pack of dogs by giving them a dog training manual. It just ain’t gonna happen, and we wouldn’t expect it to happen, either.
Democrats take policy pretty seriously. The three most recent Democratic presidents prior to Biden—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—were known to immerse themselves in the details of policy. Tune into a Democratic primary debate and you’ll likely see a bunch of candidates trying to flex their policy muscles. (Democrats love telling voters they “have a plan for that.”) On the other hand, Republicans are less likely to emphasize policy, mainly because conservatives are uninclined to turn to government as the solution to public problems. Yet it would be absolutely wrong to argue conservatives don’t care about policy. In fact, conservative think tanks have long generated conservative policy proposals designed to address public problems. No matter what you think about their merits as policy, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (which “ended welfare as we know it”) and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 were serious policy proposals. Obamacare’s individual mandate and health care exchanges were based on conservative healthcare policies, as was environmental cap-and-trade legislation. While I never took Paul Ryan seriously as a policy wonk—the chair of the House Budget Committee may engage in wishful thinking and accounting tricks but he should know when the math just doesn’t add up—the very fact Ryan played the role of policy wonk was at least proof Republican leadership knew it needed skin in the policy game.
As partisanship deepened, divided government became the norm, and control over Congress tightened, policymaking took a backseat to gridlock and messaging bills. Even bills designed to bring opponents together around policies both sides could sell to their constituents went nowhere. But it was Donald Trump who made policy irrelevant to American politics. In 2016, he ran in the general election for president against maybe the wonkiest candidate either party had nominated for president in recent memory. Hillary Clinton understood policy inside and out. Trump’s understanding of policy was negligible and incoherent; anonymous sources regularly leaked just how little he knew about the way government worked and how difficult it was to teach him the things a potential president ought to know about the job. His most famous policy prescription was a border wall whose appeal was based more on what it symbolized than what it would effectively accomplish if built. Trump’s disdain for policy should have been yet another characteristic that disqualified him from the presidency, yet he won the election regardless.
One can argue presidents don’t need to immerse themselves in policy, that they just need to supply government with a general direction and let those working for them sort out the details. Conservatives defend Trump in this regard. But for Trump and his supporters, getting the policy right—that is, trying to find a policy that would genuinely make a difference in people’s lives and improve the nation—was never the point. What mattered was that he was in command standing up for his base and sticking it to those they loathed. What mattered wasn’t the text of an executive order, but the dark, thick, jagged, oversized signature at the bottom of it, issued as though he was the first man to ever assertively wield the full power of the American presidency on behalf of the American people.
The average citizen’s eyes glaze over soon after a political discussion turns to matters of actual policy. It can get technical, and most people would probably prefer that politicians spare them the details and just get whatever needs to get done done. Policy discussions are also hard to assess: When a politician claims a proposal will only cost x number of dollars and improve something by y percent, how do we know that’s the case without researching it ourselves, and how do we know the sources we use for our research are actually trustworthy? And how do we even make sense of a policy proposal when we lack the expertise necessary to thoroughly evaluate it. If a policy discussion gets too wonky, it ends up elevating the voices of experts and technicians while shutting out the people, which isn’t ideal in a participatory democracy.
But policy discussions are in fact the work of democracy. After the people get around to designing and establishing their government, then it’s up to the government to get to work, and when it comes down to it, the work of government is policy. One of the novel things about democracy is that the people actually get to talk about what it is the government ought to do and how the government ought to do it. The people get to assess that work. Others propose alternative ways to do that work. Work needs to be justified and defended. Claims need to be tested and evaluated. Costs and benefits need to be weighed against one another. Even when it’s difficult to understand, when people take policy seriously, they take governance and decision-making seriously. It means being invested in the day-to-day work of democracy. It’s democracy in practice, the people actually doing the hard work of ruling themselves.
Our democracy is impoverished today because we just don’t seem to care much about policy anymore. MAGAites don’t take it seriously. I sense progressives are beginning to feel their focus on policy is pointless. What matters more is power: Who has it, who they represent and who they oppose, how to get it, how to keep it, how to wield it. The American government isn’t a decision-making process anymore; it’s a regime. And it’s miserable to think about American government in that way.
Looking back on my undergraduate self, maybe it was naïve to believe American politics was just an arena where ideas are in competition with one another. It’s so cerebral, so refined, so idyllic, so Sorkin-esque (although I never bought what The West Wing was selling) to believe well-documented evidence supporting a clearly-articulated thesis statement could somehow convince those with their hands on the levers of power to maybe push that lever in a certain direction.
But then again, democracy should be a more refined form of government. It improves upon itself when it is more than the expression of the will of a majority but an expression of a people who have used the advantages of democracy—liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, transparency, accountability—to improve their management of public affairs, to research and imagine solutions to public problems, and justify their proposals with evidence and reasons. Too often we think of democracy as producing simply what the people want; we often don’t think of democracy as a way for people to ascertain what is good, what is better, what is working. We won’t come close to that aspiration if we give up on policy, if we no longer expect our politicians to actually put their plans on paper and defend them and if we are no longer engaged in the process of evaluating those plans on their merits. If we’re not doing or even expecting that, we’re not doing our work as citizens nor taking the work of governance seriously.
Signals and Noise
By Blake Hounshell, for the New York Times: “The Midterm Races That Give Democrats Nightmares”
From “They Knew Exactly Who Trump Was” by Gloria Borger, for CNN: “It’s an argument we heard over and over again throughout recent years: Yeah, I coulda left this guy, but I thought it was better to stay so I could be part of the guardrails around Trump. But here’s what we learned during these hearings: There were no guardrails around the then-President, and certainly none strong enough to contain his election fraud mania. In fact, Trump busted through them with great regularity.”
Don Trump is telling his supporters he needs to run for president again so he can avoid criminal charges.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos told a Wisconsin news station that Trump called him last week asking him to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results. The call came after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled ballot drop boxes were unconstitutional in the state. When Vos told Trump the ruling applied to elections going forward, Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social, “Looks like Speaker Robin Vos, a long time professional RINO always looking to guard his flank, will be doing nothing about the amazing Wisconsin Supreme Court decision.…The Democrats would like to sincerely thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs, for letting them get away with ‘murder.’” The Republican chair of Wisconsin’s election committee called this week to decertify Biden’s win in Wisconsin.
(By the way, about those drop boxes: An Associated Press survey of state elections officials found no problems with their use in the 2020 elections.)
THIS WEEK IN VOTER FRAUD: The husband of a Colorado woman who has been missing since May 2020 has pleaded guilty to casting her mail-in ballot for her during the 2020 election. He used the ballot to vote for Trump because he assumed “all these other guys were cheating.” BONUS FACT: The man was charged with first-degree murder last year for the death of his wife but saw the charges dropped in April after prosecutors violated discovery rules.
The Arizona GOP has censured Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who recently testified before the House January 6 Committee about how he rebuffed efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the results on the election in Arizona. More recently, Bowers has said he no longer considers Trump fit to hold office.
FiveThirtyEight looked at Republican nominees for Congress and major statewide offices and found 35% of the nominees are full-on election deniers. Over half of the GOP’s nominees have at least flirted with election denial.
Herschel Walker, the GOP’s Senate nominee in Georgia, delivered a speech in 2019 in which he falsely claimed to be an FBI agent and claimed to have armed himself with a gun and pursued a man with the intent to kill after the man had offended him. (Only a bumper sticker on the man’s car reading “Honk if You Love Jesus” kept Walker from doing so.) Walker also said at the event that his favorite game wasn’t football but Russian roulette.
The state of Maryland has one of the most reasonable Republican governors in the nation, Larry Hogan. Last Tuesday, Republicans in Maryland nominated for governor Dan Cox, a man who has called himself a “true Confederate” and whom Hogan called a “QAnon whackjob.” Hogan has said he won’t vote for Cox this fall. The GOP’s attorney general nominee may be even worse. (I would add, however, that Democrats did something pretty dumb in this race: They actively promoted Cox’s campaign in the hopes of avoiding a match-up with Hogan’s preferred successor. That’s playing with fire in a state Democrats should be able to win if they don’t take the campaign for granted.)
What’s going on with the Secret Service? On the one hand, agents protecting Mike Pence on 1/6 were so concerned that rioters would reach them in the Capitol that they asked those they were in communication with back at the White House to tell their families goodbye and that they loved them. Yet at the same time, the agency deleted a bunch of texts from agents that day, leading to a criminal investigation. While the agency is claiming this was an error, some are speculating that agents loyal to Trump did so to protect the president.
From Jonathan Swan, of Axios: “Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his ‘America First’ ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.”
After Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia put the kibosh on Biden’s Build Back Better plan (including its climate change provisions), Biden indicated he was prepared to use his executive authority to fight climate change. Manchin was asked what he supported Biden’s actions. Manchin: “Let’s see what the Congress does. The Congress needs to act.”
One environmental program Joe Manchin does like: Spending $15 million to protect wetlands surrounding property he and his wife own.
If I told you we were going back to the 2017 tax code—the one before the Trump tax cuts kicked in—would you be outraged? People always gripe about taxes, but it’s not as though the 2017 tax code compared to other tax codes was an abomination. It’s certainly fairer that what we have now. And every Democrat—whether they’re named Manchin, Sinema, or Gottheimer—opposed trading it in for the Trump tax cuts. Going back to the 2017 tax code would even net the government an extra $3 trillion, mostly from high-wage earners. But congressional Democrats—again, including Democrats named Manchin, Sinema, and Gottheimer—can’t find a way to ditch the Trump tax code for the 2017 tax code.
An Impact Research poll found only 24% of voters know that President Biden’s infrastructure bill was passed and signed into law.
The Cook Political Report breaks down the partisan tilt of the Electoral College and finds Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3-4 points to feel confident they’ll win enough votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency.
The White House is claiming Russia plans on annexing large portions of eastern and southern Ukraine later this year.
Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred rejects the premise that minor league baseball players are not paid a living wage. The average minor leaguer not on an MLB 40-man roster makes $14,000 annually plus housing accommodations.
