Brendan Nyhan

C-SPAN has done a laudable job of keeping itself non-political over the years, but airing a Holocaust denier in the name of balance is perverse. We have to draw lines as a society, and that is one of them. I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.

It’s annoyed me for years when flight attendants talk about how to “deplane” the aircraft. Repeat after me: it’s not a word. You don’t “de-car” when you get out of your automobile. But things took a turn yesterday when I was riding Caltrain — they came on the intercom and told us how to “de-train.” Noooooo!!!

It looks like the media is catching up to All the President’s Spin — Jay Rosen, an NYU prof, wrote a widely publicized post last month arguing that the Bush administration is trying to delegitimize the press, which is the thesis of Chapter 2 of the book.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has been even more dishonest than we thought. In the conclusion to the book, we used the Karen Ryan story, in which the administration used a phony “video news release” to get its message into local newscasts unedited, as an example of how bad things could get if the public doesn’t take a stand. But Sunday’s New York Times revealed that the practice is shockingly pervasive:

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

Yesterday President Bush defended the practice during a news conference:

Q Mr. President, earlier this year, you told us you wanted your administration to cease and desist on payments to journalists to promote your agenda. You cited the need for ethical concerns and the need for bright line between the press and the government. Your administration continue to make the use of video news releases, which is prepackaged news stories sent to television stations, fully aware that some — or many of these stations will air them without any disclaimer that they are produced by the government. The Comptroller General of the United States, this week, said that raises ethical questions. Does it raise ethical questions about the use of government money to produce stories about the government that wind up being aired with no disclosure that they were produced by the government?

THE PRESIDENT: There is a Justice Department opinion that says these — these pieces are within the law, so long as they’re based upon facts, not advocacy. And I expect our agencies to adhere to that ruling, to that Justice Department opinion. This has been a longstanding practice of the federal government to use these types of videos. The Agricultural Department, as I understand it, has been using these videos for a long period of time. The Defense Department, other departments have been doing so. It’s important that they be based on the guidelines set out by the Justice Department.

Now, I also — I think it would be helpful if local stations then disclosed to their viewers that that’s — that this was based upon a factual report, and they chose to use it. But evidently, in some cases, that’s not the case. So, anyway.

Q The administration could guarantee that’s happening by including that language in the pre-packaged report.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I don’t — oh, you mean a disclosure, “I’m George W. Bush, and I” —

Q Well, some way to make sure it couldn’t air without the disclosure that you believe is so vital.

THE PRESIDENT: You know, Ken, there’s a procedure that we’re going to follow, and the local stations ought to — if there’s a deep concern about that, ought to tell their viewers what they’re watching.

Bush was far too blithe about disclosing the government’s role and relied on a ridiculous distinction between “facts” and “advocacy” (as if the videos don’t constitute advocacy for the administration). This is similar to the lousy defense offered for the Ryan video by Health and Human Services spokesmen Kevin W. Keane and Bill Pierce that we quoted in ATPS (p. 253) — but with one key distinction. Like Bush, Pierce put the onus on local broadcasters, saying, “There is no way this can be deceptive,” to which he added, “If [local newscasts] run the whole package, that’s their choice.” But while Pierce cited the accuracy of the facts in the video as a defense, he described the package as advocacy in a different interview: “All we have done is promote our point of view. Everything that’s in the video is true; none of the facts are incorrect.”

Will anyone in the media notice the contradiction?

Senator Robert Byrd spoke at a MoveOn.org rally yesterday in Washington DC
against the “nuclear option,” which would eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. Here’s a picture:

The sign in front of him makes it pretty clear what they’re trying to do yet again — falsely claim that the “nuclear option” is an assault on free speech and the Constitution. Byrd’s speech was quite explicit about this (worst parts in bold):

An ill wind is blowing across this country. That wind blows the seeds of destruction. Our Constitution is under attack. We must speak out and kill this dangerous effort to rewrite our precious Constitution. Our freedom of speech is in jeopardy.

Some in the United States Senate want to “bully” the American people and the Senate and force feed us far right wing judges.

We cannot let them do it!

Their view of the Constitution is based on the opinions of a fancy Washington law firm. Our view of the Constitution is based on the views of the Framers who wrote it.

They say we don’t need 200 years of American history. Oh no! According to opponents of the filibuster, 200 years of history is a bore. It’s simply passe. Old hat. They say the Constitution is stale bread. Opponents of free speech see no need to rely on Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, or Hamilton.

They want to nuke debate in the Senate and stand the Senate rules on their head. They want to gag the world’s greatest deliberative body.

These instant Constitutional “experts” want to warp the Senate’s Constitutional purpose with a witch’s brew of half-truths, twisted logic and vicious attacks on American history. Why? Because they don’t like the rules. They want to change the rules so they can pack the courts.

They want to change the rules in the middle of the game to get their own way. Who cares about the consequences for the rest of the country? Who cares about minority views in a free society?

Don’t they know that sometimes the majority can be wrong? No! They don’t care! They want what they want, and they want it now. Consequences be damned!

They want the Senate to rubber stamp their judges, just like they wanted the Senate to rubber stamp the wrong headed war in Iraq!

This is a nation built by God-fearing people who want to preserve liberty. The people fear the policies of this White House and its judicial nominees. They worry about the $1 billion a week that we spend for the war in Iraq. They worry about the ballooning federal deficit. People are afraid for their social security. People are afraid for their basic rights.

Are we going to be muzzled by a majority that wants to silence us on all of these issues? Delay, deliberation, and debate may be a waste of time to some, but it’s free speech and the American way to all of us who love our country.

There must be no gag rule for the United States Senate. We must preserve free speech and the rights of the minority. Spread the word high and low. Court packing no – – free speech yes. Nuke the nuclear option. No gag rule in the U.S. Senate.

Just to reiterate the points I’ve made before (here and here):

(1) Legislators have no right to free speech. If they did, nothing would get done. Right now, 60 senators have the right to cut off debate and bring a bill to a vote — by Byrd’s logic, this is an infringement of “free speech,” even though he’s voted for such motions in the past. The “nuclear option” would change the threshold to 50 for judicial appointees. But in either case, debate must be cut off or there would never be votes. The issue in question is minority power, not free speech.

(2) The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. It’s a tradition, but has evolved a great deal over time. To call this an assault on the Constitution is ridiculous.

Update 3/17: The DLC has published a much smarter and more restrained article criticizing the “nuclear option.” It comes much closer than Byrd to convincing me that it’s a bad idea.

Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has nice analysis of the savings problem in the New York Times. As he tells it, the problem is that good schools are judged by a relative standard, and when every family is bidding against every family to live in areas with the best schools, it may be rational to forego savings and spend more on housing. (This is similar to the analysis in the book The Two Income Trap.)

He explains this idea as follows:

The basic idea is captured in the following thought experiment:

If you were society’s median earner, which option would you prefer?

-You save enough to support a comfortable standard of living in retirement, but your children attend a school whose students score in the 20th percentile on standardized tests in reading and math; or

-You save too little to support a comfortable standard of living in retirement, but your children attend a school whose students score in the 50th percentile on those tests.

It is an unpleasant choice, to be sure, but most people say they would pick the second option.

But this creates an arms race dynamic that leaves everyone worse off – it’s a classic collective action problem:

Because the concept of a “good” school is relative, this thought experiment captures an essential element of the savings decision confronting most families. If others bid for houses in better school districts, failure to do likewise will often consign one’s children to inferior schools. Yet no matter how much each family spends, half of all children must attend schools in the bottom half.

The savings decision thus resembles the collective action problem inherent in a military arms race. Each nation knows that it would be better if everyone spent less on arms. Yet if others keep spending, it is too dangerous not to follow suit. Curtailing an arms race requires an enforceable agreement. Similarly, unless all families can bind themselves to save more, those who do so unilaterally risk having to send their children to inferior schools.

His solution? Mandatory savings deducted from income growth:

A collective agreement that each family save a portion of its income growth each year would attack both sources of the savings shortfall. Such an agreement might specify that one-third of income growth be diverted into savings until a target savings rate – say, 12 percent of income – was achieved. A family whose income did not rise in a given year would be exempt from the agreement.

I’m not sure mandatory savings will ever be politically viable (or philosophically acceptable), but this is a very clever idea…

Will Saletan takes apart the administration’s conflicting Social Security pitches to minority communities on Slate. Up is down! Here’s the payoff:

In an op-ed written in Spanish and not made available in English on any federal Web site, the administration argues that Latinos, who live longer than whites do, should support Bush’s reform plan because upon retirement they rely disproportionately on Social Security. Meanwhile, in forums and private meetings aimed at blacks, the administration argues that blacks, who upon retirement rely disproportionately on Social Security, should support Bush’s reform plan because they don’t live as long as whites do. Only once has Bush slipped up and alluded to one group in the course of making his pitch to the other. And on that occasion, at best, he seems to have conveyed—and failed to correct after its publication—an impression that helped him politically but was contrary to the truth.

(Note: Saletan exposes more doubletalk in the full article – it’s worth a look.)

Media Matters and Bob Somerby note that George Will made a screaming error in this passage from his Washington Post column on Sunday:

Today the government is partially funded by that surplus of Social Security tax revenue over outlays, a fact disguised by politicians talking rot about Social Security being an “insurance” program with a “trust fund” in a “lock box.” But between 2011 and 2016, Social Security outlays will exceed revenue by $32 billion, and the sums will rapidly increase during the cascading retirements of baby boomers.

As the critics point out, this is obviously untrue — the statistic we endlessly hear repeated is that Social Security is projected to move into deficit from 2018, not in 2011. Somerby does an excellent job of tracing the mistake back to a Roll Call column by New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg in which he talked about the decline of the Social Security surplus between 2011 and 2016. Gregg wrote, “At that point [after 2011], the surplus begins to diminish for the first time, falling to $113 billion in 2012, $106 billion in 2013 and so on down to $85 billion in 2015 and accelerating downward every year thereafter.” He later adds, “In the five-year period from 2011 to 2016, the contracting Social Security surplus will gouge $32 billion out of the rest of the budget and with each coming year remove an accelerating amount as the Social Security surplus continues to shrink.” Will appears to have misunderstood Gregg’s argument entirely.

Over at Tapped, Sam Rosenfeld catches a mistake in Jonathan Weisman’s Washington Post article today, which states that the so-called PAYGO rules in Congress “[require] that future tax cuts be paid for by equal proportions of spending cuts and revenue increases.” The rules (which should be reinstated) actually only require that new spending or tax cuts be paid for by through spending cuts and/or revenue increases; they do not require that the proportions be equal. (See also my post on an as-yet-uncorrected error in a Weisman/Jim VandeHei story on Social Security.)

As I wrote below, the president has the institutional power to focus debate on one issue and ignore questions about the opportunity costs of devoting resources to addressing that issue. In 2001, for instance, tax cuts were a much lower priority than other issues for the public, but when asked whether they wanted tax cuts or not, people said yes.

Here’s some new evidence of the same dynamic on Social Security from the ABC News/Washington Post poll. People agree that Social Security should be addressed, but it’s not their top issue priority at all:

3. Which of these should be the highest priority for Bush and Congress this year: (The U.S. campaign against terrorism), (the war in Iraq), (the economy and jobs), (health care), (Social Security) or something else?

Terrorism 17%
Economy/jobs 23%
Health care 27%
Social Security 10%
Something else 5%
No opinion 2%

4. If changes are not made, do you think the Social Security system is heading for a crisis down the road, or not?

Yes 71%
No 23%
Already in crisis (vol.) 1%
No opinion 5%

Rep. Chris Cox isn’t the only one claiming that WMDs were in Iraq before we invaded. The liberal group Media Matters documented Rush Limbaugh doing the same thing on Monday:

LIMBAUGH: The New York Times’ big story yesterday, it’s all about how these serious weapons in Iraq were looted after we invaded Baghdad. And, of course, this is nothing more than a rehash of the story they tried to run, they did run.

They tried to gin people up against Bush one week before the election, remember that? Same thing, weapons looted, weapons missing, the whole thing. It’s just amazing. I don’t know how else to describe it. Still trying to drum up anti-war sentiment, Bush is incompetent, Bush is a boob. It’s just amazing.

They can’t get off of it. It illustrates they’re stubborn and they’re hell-bent on convincing people of this, to hell with everything else that might be going on in the world, factual or otherwise. But, in the process, they end up admitting that the weapons were there all along.

And that horrible weapons were there. So, Bush could not have lied about it. And yet, the whole basis, if there’s a foundation for the Democratic Party’s current anti-war position, it is that Bush lied. And, of course, that’s the foundation of Michael Moore’s stupid piece of propaganda. It’s that Bush lied. Bush didn’t lie. And, The New York Times, as much as said so yesterday.

[…]

LIMBAUGH: The New York Times reports that there were horrible weapons in Iraq and they got secreted out of there after we invaded. And, it’s Bush’s fault because he’s an idiot. But, their point all along has been there weren’t any weapons, that Bush lied about it. Now all of a sudden Bush didn’t lie, he’s so inept and the weapons got looted before they could round them up.

Of course, the Times article did not document the looting of weapons, but specialized machinery that could be used in WMD production. This kind of misinformation is why so many Americans continue to believe (PDF) that Iraq had WMDs.

In an email to supporters tonight, DNC chair Howard Dean echoed Robert Byrd’s tactic (debunked here) of portraying the “nuclear option,” which would prevent filibusters on judicial appointees, as a matter of free speech:

Today Harry Reid and the Democratic Senators asked us, the American people, to help them preserve the right of our elected representatives to speak their mind on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

We have to act. Sign this petition, which we will deliver to every U.S. Senator, asking them to protect the right to free speech in the Senate. If they don’t, it is not only their voice that will be silenced — it will be ours.

Dean also asks party members to “Please tell your Senator to stand up for free speech” and urges them to “act together in order to protect our democracy,” providing a link to this petition, which also uses free speech language:

Democrats in the Senate, lead by Democratic leader Harry Reid, are committed to preserving the right of our elected representatives to speak their mind on the floor of the U.S Senate.

Let’s be clear — there’s a lot at stake in this debate. But “free speech” is just code to make it look like the Constitution is being threatened. It is not. And the Dean email and Democratic petition fail to explain the issue so that supporters can make up their own minds.

To review, the filibuster is a parliamentary rule that does not appear in the Constitution. In its current form, it allows 2/5 of senators to prevent debate on a bill from being terminated, which effectively blocks it from being brought to a vote (see the Wikipedia definition and my November ’04 primer). The “nuclear option” under consideration by Republicans would prevent Democrats from filibustering the nominations of judicial appointees, thereby reducing the threshold of votes necessary to put them on the bench from 60 to 50.

In short, this is a debate about the power of the minority in the Senate, not “speech.” As I said before, legislators do not have a right to unlimited parliamentary debate — if they did, nothing would ever get done. Moreover, senators have ample opportunity to vent their fascinating opinions for hours on C-SPAN, and do so at great length. The “nuclear option” would not change that. And the reality is that a successful filibuster usually ends debate on an issue rather than prolonging it. In short, this is nonsense.

There is a more serious debate that we should have as a country about the power of the minority under the filibuster. Do we want 40 senators to be able to block debate on an issue? I don’t know the answer to this question, which raises questions about representation (the Senate overrepresents small states), the proper amount of minority power (if any), and government responsiveness to public opinion. (Reading assignment: Keith Khrebiel’s Pivotal Politics.) I do know one thing, though – Howard Dean is full of shit.

Bonus debunking

Two other ridiculous Dean talking points:

1) “Americans did not endorse the fringe agenda to dismantle Social Security. And they did not endorse dismantling the system of checks and balances that have served our country for over 200 years.”

Checks and balances is a reference to the separation of powers, an element of Constitutional design. By invoking the phrase, Dean suggests that Republicans are tampering with the Constitution. But they are not. The filibuster is an internal legislative branch issue. (It is true, however, that the super-majority requirement of the Senate presents a major hurdle to passage of any bill.)

2) “More Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history.”

First, Americans voted for Bush than any presidential candidate in history, so this is a pretty stupid talking point. The size of the vote against him was a function of higher turnout and population growth. Moreover, as Brian Carnell points out, the total vote for George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot in 1992 was even larger than Kerry’s total.