Brendan Nyhan

I understand the concern about a potential wave of Haitian refugees, but someone at the State Department needs to construct a new contingency plan:

United States officials say they worry that in the coming weeks, worsening conditions in Haiti could spur an exodus. They have not only started a campaign to persuade Haitians to stay put, but they are also laying plans to scoop up any boats carrying illegal immigrants and send them to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

We’ve taken a significant hit for imprisoning suspected terrorists at Guantánamo, which has become a rallying point for anti-American sentiment around the world. Given that context, locking up desperate Haitian refugees there seems like a pretty stupid public relations move.

A major question in the special Senate election going on in Massachusetts right now is whether the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, is too conservative for the state.

Matthew Yglesias says Brown is playing a losing hand:

At the end of the day, it’s hardly impossible for a Republican to win statewide in Massachusetts. Mitt Romney won in 2002. Paul Cellucci won in 1998. And William Weld won in 1990 and 1994. What’s more, Weld almost beat John Kerry in 1996. There hasn’t been an open Senate seat in Massachusetts in forever, and it’s hard to beat incumbents who aren’t hit by scandal or something, but in the more open fields of gubernatorial politics the Bay State Republicans have done quite well. But the formula for winning as a Republican in Massachusetts is pretty clear—you want to be independent from the machine, and generally for lower taxes and less regulation than your Democratic opponent, but also decidedly not as right-wing as the kind of guys the GOP runs for Senate in Alabama.

And Brown’s just not doing that. He’s close enough to Coakley that you’ve got to believe he really could win if he would find a signature issue on which to demonstrate his independence. He could be a consistent libertarian, who’s for low taxes, less regulation, gun rights, but also gay equality and minimal restrictions on abortion. Or he could espouse green conservatism and say he’s generally on the right but wants to back a cap-and-trade program. Or he could think of something else. But instead he seems to have thought of . . . nothing at all besides putting a slightly moderate spin on orthodox conservative views.

There’s just no reason to think this will work. Mitt Romney couldn’t have won with this strategy. Nor could Paul Cellucci. Nor could Bill Weld. The obvious thing to do would have been to follow in those guys’ footsteps, but Brown’s not doing it. And this kind of ideological inflexibility is the best way for a party to squander a very favorable electoral landscape.

However, Boris Shor, a political scientist at the Harris School at the University of Chicago, finds that Brown’s record is relatively liberal even by Massachusetts Republican standards:

In 2002, he filled out a Votesmart survey on his policy positions in the context of running for the State Senate… [H]ow do we compare Brown to other state legislators, or more generally to other politicians across the country? My research, along with Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, allows us to make precisely these comparisons. Essentially, I use the entirety of state legislative voting records across the country, and I make them comparable by calibrating them through Project Votesmart’s candidate surveys.

By doing so, I can estimate Brown’s ideological score very precisely. It turns out that his score is –0.17, compared with [New York State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava’s] score of 0.02. Liberals have lower scores; conservatives higher ones.

Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country!

Of course, while the Republicans here are liberal, Democrats are incredibly liberal. In comparison to them, Brown is a conservative. He was also the most conservative of the tiny handful of Republican State Senators.

One possible interpretation is both are right — Brown’s record is relatively moderate, but he’s still not liberal enough to win a statewide election in Massachusetts. It also seems likely that he’s moved right to try to inspire his base for a low-turnout special election, though I don’t know for sure.

Update 1/15 5:18 PM: Shor clarifies in comments:

Moving ideologically wouldn’t be unheard of when moving from a small constituency to such a large one (think of Gillibrand). But the political science literature shows scant evidence that this is systematically true, as far as I know.

My only comment would be that Votesmart survey is important, but wouldn’t be enough by itself. I am including his entire roll-call record, as well as that of every other MA state legislator. The survey is only being used to put state legislators and members of Congress on a common scale. The roll call database wouldn’t be enough by itself either, because of varying agendas. So what’s new is the roll call record, plus mating it to the Votesmart survey.

I’ve corrected the post above to note that Shor is using Brown’s legislative voting record as well as his Votesmart survey response. In terms of Shor’s other point, he is correct that legislators tend to be ideologically consistent over time. The question is whether that finding applies to Brown or if he’s deviated from his previous stances for the Senate race.

Matthew Yglesias has the best take on a new CQ study which finds that President Obama has the highest “success rate” on Congressional votes for any first-year president since Eisenhower:

I continue to think that this approach may prove counterproductive in the midterms. The kind of activists who you need to give money, volunteer, and urge their friends to vote like to see the President they worked to elect out there fighting against the bad guys. Watching him sound out where the pivotal member stands, and then leaning on everyone to his left to get in line is demoralizing. As I’ve been saying, I think taking on the banks is a good opportunity to break this dynamic and draw a few lines in the sand. That means an enhanced risk of losing congressional votes, but it would help people stay engaged with the fact that there are real stakes in the coming elections.

The implication is that Obama should take more positions on votes he won’t win. It’s an interesting question — what is the optimal rate of presidential losses on legislation? The politics are difficult. Obama doesn’t want to antagonize the centrists whose votes he needs to pass his agenda, but at the same time his base doesn’t think he is fighting hard enough for the liberal cause.

More generally, it’s worth noting that the situation Obama faces is hard to compare with other post-WWII presidents. George W. Bush is the only other case in the sample who had unified control of Congress and an ideologically cohesive party, but it only lasted for part of his first year (i.e. until the Jeffords switch). In addition, the rise of the filibuster as a de facto requirement in recent years increases the importance of the 51st-60th senators, and therefore raises the costs of the president potentially antagonizing them by taking minority positions.

Adam Nagourney’s profile of Harry Reid for the New York Times Magazine includes a potentially misleading statement about Harry Reid’s feelings toward gambling (emphasis added):

By reputation and appearance, Reid, who is 70, is one of the blander elected officials in Washington. Upon closer inspection, he is deeply and deceptively interesting. He is a senator from Nevada who hates gambling (“The only people who make money from gambling are the joints and government”); a backroom deal-maker who does not drink alcohol or coffee; a Washington celebrity who sniffs at the dinner-and-party circuit.

Harry Reid may personally dislike gambling, but as I learned when I worked in Nevada politics, you don’t become an elected official there as an opponent of the casinos. Reid has certainly taken anti-gambling positions, but they typically take the form of preventing competition with casinos in his state (i.e. opposing Internet gambling, Indian casinos, etc.). There’s a reason Reid has received over $500,000 in campaign contributions from casino and gambling interests since 2005.

[Disclosure: I worked on Ed Bernstein’s Senate campaign in Nevada in 2000.]

Here are the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
–Headline: “Obama concedes he hasn’t brought country together.” In other news, the sun came up today.
-Are the advantages of prediction markets being oversold?
-Michael Kinsley on the Reid quote as meta-gaffe: “It is entirely the creation of the process of publicizing it.”
-Ezra Klein notes how pundits and opinion editors lack even a basic understanding of most policy issues. Sad but true.
-TPM’s Justin Elliott traces the spread of the apparent myth that Flight 253 bomber had a one-way ticket.
-Sarah Palin reportedly believed Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
-Birther conspiracy theories are so outlandish that Glenn Beck thinks they’re nuts. Meanwhile, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) has jumped on the bandwagon.
–Super-cool economics field experiments.

The White House keeps saying that President Obama is focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but what is he going to do to create jobs? The only examples I’ve seen are small-bore ideas like “cash for caulkers” that are the economic equivalent of President Clinton promoting school uniforms.

In reality, the jobs push is mostly for show. Besides big pump-priming stimulus measures (which are now ruled out due to the deficit), the president’s ability to affect the economy in the short term is limited — he is largely a prisoner of circumstance. However, it’s politically important to appear to be trying to do something to (a) limit the political costs of the economic slump and (b) be able to claim credit for subsequent growth.* That’s why you’re going to see such an emphasis on jobs from the administration going forward.

* For an example of how (b) is often done in a misleading way, see this post on how Treasury Department tried to claim that the 2003 Bush tax cuts were responsible for subsequent jobs growth (while omitting the 2001-2002 period, including the 2001 tax cuts).

Update 1/15 5:33 PM: Kevin Drum makes a similar argument in objecting to a specious Charlie Cook column stating that Obama should have “pivoted back to jobs and the economy sooner”:

Is it a purely political argument that, regardless of the merits, Obama should have been viewed as spending 24/7 hunkered down in the West Wing helping create jobs for American workers? Or is it a substantive argument that governments have limited bandwidth and Obama should have spent more of his on reducing the unemployment rate?

The former is puerile and the latter is mysterious. What exactly should he have done? He passed a big stimulus bill, and it’s plain that there’s no political will in Congress to pass another one of any size. He extended unemployment benefits. He tried to take action on mortgage foreclosures, and perhaps he could have done more along those lines. But the financial lobby fought him, Congress wouldn’t support cramdown legislation, and banks have resisted taking part in his program. The Consumer Finance Protection Agency would be a nice pro-worker feather in his cap, but it wouldn’t help anyone find a job and probably wouldn’t have gotten through Congress any quicker even if they weren’t busy with healthcare.

So exactly what would his “pivot” back to jobs have looked like? Nobody ever really says. But aside from giving rousing speeches, the big levers available to fix the economy are monetary, which is in the hands of the Fed; fiscal, which he’s done; and meliorative, which he’s largely done too. The rest is mostly window dressing.

It’s time to lay down a marker on punditry about the Obama White House. During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama’s approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has made poor strategic choices or that the President isn’t “connecting” with the American public. Hundreds of hours will be spent constructing elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.

What few will point out, however, is that the Obama administration (like every White House) is largely a prisoner of circumstance — the combination of lingering economic weakness and an upcoming midterm election would hurt any president. David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel certainly didn’t become any less skillful in the last few months; Obama is just playing a weaker hand than he was during the campaign and subsequent honeymoon period. As such, it’s hard to know how much of the decline in the standing of Obama and the Democrats is the result of the choices the White House has made.
Here’s what I wrote along these lines back in August:

The problem… is that the underlying fundamentals have changed.

Back during the presidential campaign, the fundamentals always favored Obama (assuming no racial backlash). The August “doldrums” were a minor interlude before political gravity asserted itself. In the end, Obama converged almost precisely to the median forecast of leading election polls.

The fundamentals of the presidency are very different. The approval ratings of presidents tend to decline over time and they typically have a difficult time passing important legislation after their first year or two in office (i.e. once the low-hanging fruit has been picked). As Greg Marx and Matthew Yglesias have correctly pointed out, the president’s abilities to influence Congress on domestic legislation are actually quite limited. And in Obama’s case, he faces a poor economy that will push his approval numbers into the 40s very soon. The one factor working in his favor are the large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, but the Senate caucus lacks sufficient unity and discipline to push through health care and other controversial legislation in the form that he wants.

…Obama’s plan for the next six to twelve months is far less likely to succeed than his general election strategy. Unfortunately for Obama’s liberal critics, it’s not clear that a strategic change will make much difference either. Good fundamentals make political strategists look like geniuses (see: Karl Rove 9/12/01-11/2/04) and bad fundamentals make the same strategists look ineffectual (see: Karl Rove 11/3/04-1/20/09). In the current environment, there’s no magical strategy that will change the political dynamics of this presidency.

So what can we expect? Obama is likely to cut some sort of deal on health care and declare victory. He will then face an even more difficult menu of legislative battles (including the climate bill and immigration), many of which will not be resolved to the satisfaction of liberals. In the absence of a 9/11-type foreign policy crisis, Obama’s presidency — like almost all others — faces a downward trajectory of power and influence for the next couple of years. The big question is whether the economy will revive enough for him to be reelected.

We won’t get a conversation along these lines, however, because the media prefers a discussion about personality and tactics, which help create narrative storylines for day-to-day coverage and don’t require policy expertise. Both liberal and conservative pundits are generally happy to go along for similar reasons — the only difference is what narrative of Obama’s decline is presented (i.e. “Obama is demoralizing the base by not fighting hard enough for liberal causes” or “Obama is alienating the country by going too far to the left”).

Update 1/11 9:05 PM: Senior White House adviser David Axelrod acknowledged that the White House is partly “at the mercy of forces that are larger than things we can control” in an interview with Ron Brownstein (emphasis added):

Asked what has to happen in the next 10 months to produce the best possible result for Democrats in November, Axelrod didn’t hesitate in identifying his top priority: an economy that is adding, rather than losing, jobs each month. “I think job growth is certainly number one,” he said. “I think that’s how most people measure a recovering economy.”

To nudge that process along, he says, he expects Congress to quickly conclude legislation to promote job growth: “We have to take that up right away,” he said. Still, he has no illusions about the capacity of further legislation to significantly affect the employment trajectory — or the likely impact next fall if it doesn’t improve.

“In certain ways we are at the mercy of forces that are larger than things we can control,” Axelrod said. “If we see steady months of jobs growth between now and next November, I think the picture will be different than if we don’t. I think Ronald Reagan learned that lesson in 1982. We’re not immune to the physics of all of this. But I’m guardedly optimistic that we are going to see that progress. You know, there are signs of that. We’re going to just keep doing everything we can to promote progress.”

Update 1/12 1:58 PM: Matthew Yglesias approvingly links to this post, but takes a slightly different perspective:

I largely agree with that, but the state of the economy isn’t just “circumstances,” in part it’s a result of the Obama administration’s policies. In particular, they chose to take what they could get on stimulus and then move on to other elements of the agenda—notably health care. People in the future will look back and, with some reason, debate whether it would have made more sense to stay focused on the short-term economic picture especially when the condition of the economy turned out to be so much worse than forecast when the Recovery Act was initially outlined.

I’m not sure what exactly the White House could have done if it had “stay[ed] focused on the short-term economic picture” after February — a second stimulus was politically impossible. A better question might be whether the compromises necessary to get the stimulus bill through the Senate will inflict a heavy political price on Obama in 2010. Paul Krugman and others have argued that the stimulus package should have been larger and not devoted so much money to tax cuts. But at the time Democrats only had fifty eight seats and needed support from two Republicans to pass a bill, so Obama cut a deal to get the support of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter (who was then still a Republican).

Update 1/15 9:47 AM: For a classic example of the type of punditry I mentioned in the first paragraph above, see this Peggy Noonan column on Obama’s supposed “disconnect” with the American people.

Update 1/15 5:30 PM: Ezra Klein expresses similar thoughts.

As others have noted, media coverage of the surprise retirements of Democratic senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan has been shockingly bad.

First, many outlets have exaggerated the damage that was done to Democratic prospects in November. Consider this statement by Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered:

2010 just got tougher for Democrats now that two Democratic Senators have announced retirements… NPR’s David Welna explains that those two departures could jeopardize the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority.

But in reality, the net effect of the two decisions on the number of seats Democrats will retain in the Senate is likely to be small. Dodd’s departure cleared the way for Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a much more popular figure, to enter the race, while Dorgan’s departure substantially increased the likelihood that North Dakota governor John Hoeven will capture the seat for the GOP.

This offsetting effect can be seen nicely in the Intrade futures contracts for Democrats holding the two seats (caveat: small trading volumes):

Second, other outlets played up the retirements as indicators that President Obama faces a difficult political environment while downplaying the unique challenges that the two senators faced. For instance, here’s what Jeff Zeleny and Adam Nagourney wrote in the New York Times:

The sudden decision by two senior Democratic senators to retire shook the party’s leaders on Wednesday and signaled that President Obama is facing a perilous political environment that could hold major implications for this year’s midterm elections and his own agenda.

The rapidly shifting climate, less than a year after Mr. Obama took office on the strength of a historic Democratic sweep, was brought into focus by the announcements that Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota would retire rather than wage uphill fights for re-election…

Together, the developments heightened a perception that a conservative push against the president’s ambitious agenda, a sluggish recovery from the deep recession and an outbreak of angry populism have combined to deplete Mr. Obama’s political strength and give Republicans a chance for big gains in this year’s races for the Senate and the House.

To the degree that the retirements reflect increasing skepticism among voters about the direction Democrats are pushing the country, Mr. Obama could face a tougher time winning legislative support as he presses ahead with initiatives on climate change, financial regulation, education and other issues.

While the political context is likely to have contributed to their retirement decisions, Dodd and Dorgan were not primarily at risk because of “increasing skepticism among voters about the direction Democrats are pushing the country.” Dodd was seen as vulnerable long before any backlash against Democrats took form. Indeed, a plurality of Connecticut voters disapproved of him back in February during President Obama’s honeymoon. By contrast, Dorgan is a popular figure in North Dakota who would not have ordinarily been seen as especially vulnerable, but he faced the prospect of a challenge from a wildly popular governor.

Again, the environment is certainly unfavorable for Democrats, who are likely to suffer substantial losses in 2010. With that said, however, it’s not clear that the Dodd/Dorgan retirements made things worse or are even especially informative about the magnitude of the threat.

Update 1/14 10:53 AM: Eric Boehlert flags another example of bad reporting on the Dodd retirement from the Wall Street Journal.

No one seems to have noticed, but John Brennan, a high-ranking counterterrorism official in the Obama administration, recently castigated Republican critics of the White House as “playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort,” reprising an anti-dissent argument frequently used by the GOP during the Bush years:

The president’s statement that there was a “systemic failure” [to detect the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253] did not quell the political furor, and White House officials were caught off guard by the intensity of the criticism. After reading a Cheney statement that attacked Obama for only pretending to be at war with terrorists, David Axelrod angrily wrote a long statement trashing the former vice president and gave it to Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, who revised it and posted on the White House Web site. The criticism got Brennan’s back up too, particularly coming from some of his former colleagues in the Bush administration.

“A lot of the knuckleheads I’ve been listening to out there on the network shows don’t know what they’re talking about,” he told me after the Christmas Day attempt. Some Republicans, including Cheney, were blatantly mischaracterizing the record, he fumed. “When they say the administration’s not at war with Al Qaeda, that is just complete hogwash.” It was the angriest I had heard him during months of conversations. “What they’re doing is just playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort, which is to get us to battle among ourselves instead of focusing on them,” he said. [emphasis added]

Brennan’s comment comes on the heels of an even more explicit attack on anti-Obama dissent by Salon’s Joan Walsh, who smeared Republican criticism of Obama as “un-American” and “traitorous” on MSNBC. These statements suggest that White House and its supporters are starting to adopt the same disreputable tactics that were used to stifle criticism of the government during the Bush administration. It’s a discouraging trend.

[Updated with a response from Keith Krehbiel]

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has mounted a defense of the filibuster on his blog as producing centrist outcomes:

If you were so inclined, then, you could cite the final vote on both Bush-era bills [the 2001 tax cut and Medicare coverage of prescription drugs] as exhibits in a bipartisan case against the filibuster, using them to argue that supermajority requirements tend to block legislation no matter who’s in power. But then you’d have to claim that there would have been no Bush tax cut in 2001 without Congressional Republicans’ willingness to use reconciliation, and no Medicare Part D in 2003 if the Democrats had been willing to filibuster the final bill.

That’s possible, obviously. But it seems much more likely that a supermajority requirement would have produced a slightly smaller tax cut — closer to the one that earned those 65 Senate votes, probably — and a slightly different pattern of House-Senate negotiation on prescription drugs. In both counterfactuals, I suspect the bills would have still passed — and what’s more, that their final shape would have vindicated Jay Cost’s suggestion that the filibuster tends to pull legislative efforts toward the center, rather than killing them off entirely.

While Douthat may be right that the 2001 tax cuts and Medicare Part D would have passed under a filibuster, his broader claim that the filibuster “tends to pull legislative efforts toward the center, rather than killing them off entirely” is at least partly wrong.

Let’s bring some political science to bear on this question using the gridlock zone model popularized by Keith Krehbiel, David Brady, and Craig Volden. In this model, we assume a one-dimensional political space along which all legislators have ideal points ranging from liberal to conservative. We also assume the status quo and proposed legislation can be located as points on this dimension and that the president is near the liberal or conservative extreme. In this world, the relevant players are the veto pivot (the decisive voter on whether a presidential veto is overriden) and the filibuster pivot (the decisive voter on invoking cloture to end a filibuster), as in this figure from Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics:

Omitting technical details, the key point is that much depends on the location of the status quo. If it is located between the veto and filibuster pivots, then gridlock will prevail — the president will veto any movement away from his ideal point (and his veto will be sustained), while the filibuster pivot will block any movement toward the president’s ideal point. If the status quo is located outside the so-called gridlock zone, then it is possible to pass legislation. However, the content of the bill (i.e. its location on the ideological dimension) will be determined by the relevant pivotal voter, who must be at least indifferent between the bill and the status quo. As such, the more extreme the status quo is relative to the relevant pivot, the more centrist the resulting legislative outcome will be.

Without the filibuster, the relevant pivots constraining legislative movement toward the president becomes the median voters in the House and Senate. As such, bills on which the status quo falls between the median voters and the filibuster pivot can now be acted upon and will be moved close to the medians’ ideal points.

Using this framework, we can show that the second part of Douthat’s statement is false. The filibuster kills all bills in which the status quo falls between the median voter and the filibuster pivot. I posted a list of failed cloture votes that attracted majority support from recent sessions of Congress back in December, and there are presumably many more issues on which such votes aren’t held given the likely outcome.

As for the first part of Douthat’s statement, it depends on how you define “the center.” Getting rid of the filibuster would obviously move outcomes toward the ideal points of the median voters in the House and Senate, who are by definition the central voters in their respective chambers, so Douthat is presumably appealing to a broader notion of “the center.” Looking at the list I put together of the pivotal voters in the Senate with and without the filibuster, it’s not always obvious which is closer to the center of the national ideological distribution.

Perhaps the best approach to this question is the one taken by my future Dartmouth colleagues Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron, who asked voters about key Congressional votes in order to place them along the same dimension as legislators. They found that the House and Senate medians in the 109th Congress of 2005-2006 were more conservative than the national median voter, but the results of the 2006 election moved them much closer to the national median (PDF):

These results suggest that the filibuster pivot might have been more representative of the national median than the Congressional median in the 109th Congress (i.e. Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu instead of Ohio Republican Mike DeWine; see my December post), but in the 110th Congress the Congressional median was almost surely closer to the national median than the filibuster pivot. (Caveat: The extent to which actual legislative outcomes will correspond with the filibuster pivot’s preferences will vary by issue depending on the location of the status quo — see above.)

In short, the extent to which the national median voter’s preferences correspond with the relevant pivots in Congress will vary over time. There’s no guarantee that the filibuster pivot will be closer to the national median than the Congressional median.

Update 1/7 8:17 AM — Krehbiel sends an additional response that I’ve posted with his permission. In particular, see points (a) and (b), which make a distinction that I failed to explain sufficiently:

Interesting post, Brendan. I think, however, you are too easy on Douthat (which I confess I have not read) if he said, as you quote, that the filibuster “tends to pull legislative efforts toward the center, rather than killing them off entirely.”

In the pivotal politics model, the effect, if any, of the filibuster (as opposed to no filibuster) depends on one and only one thing: the extremity of the status quo point relative to the median and filibuster pivot. Specifically, either:

(a) the status quo is extreme in which case the filibuster pivot does not constrain convergence to the median, i.e., it has no effect, or
(b) the status quo is outside the gridlock interval but not extreme, in which case the filibuster pivot dampens convergence to the median — policy will converge/moderate, but not all the way, or
(c) the status quo is inside the gridlock interval in which case the filibuster pivot implicitly freezes it, because a 60-vote majority cannot be obtained.

That said, (re)consider Douthat’s claim, and then current healthcare politics:

To see that Douthat is wrong, note that the filibuster has no effect in situation (a): the same thing happens whether 60 votes or 51 votes are needed. This leaves only two possibilities. In situation (b), the filibuster dampens convergence rather than “tending to pull legislation toward the center” as Doubthat claims. And, in situation (c) the filibuster precludes convergence, i.e., causes gridlock which is exactly opposite the claim. In short, the argument cannot be sustained (within this framework).

The pivotal-politics interpretation of the ongoing healthcare lawmaking, similarly, depends upon where the status quo lies. If we are in situation (b), existing bills have converged towards but probably not all the way to the median voters’ ideal points in their respective houses. If we are in situation (a), however, the bill/bills will ultimately be weakened to the point that leaders come to the realization that the supermajority cannot be constructed, i.e., gridlock happens.

My only disagreement with Krehbiel concerns the interpretation of Douthat’s statement (i.e. whether he is “wrong” about the filibuster “pull[ing] legislative efforts toward the center”). As noted above, I suspect that Douthat is referring to the “center” of a broader ideological spectrum rather than the median voters in the House and Senate. As such, he may think that the dampening outcome under scenario (b) above is likely to be closer to the national median than the Congressional median outcome that would otherwise prevail. However, the Bafumi/Herron results suggest that this claim is likely to be false at least some of the time.

Update 1/7 9:37 AM — Krehbiel clarifies:

You are correct. I interpreted “pulls to the center” as “pulls all the way to the median.” My reasoning is that it would be sort of silly for one to credit (presumably) the filibuster for pulling policy [part way] to the center, when abandonment of the filibuster would allow policy to go all the way to the center (a better thing, presumably), wouldn’t it?