Brendan Nyhan

Can we put a moratorium on the phrase “filibuster-proof majority”? Yes, Arlen Specter’s defection means that Democrats will hold sixty seats in the Senate once Al Franken is eventually seated. But the phrase “filibuster-proof” falsely implies that the party will have no problem passing its agenda through the Senate. In reality, as more sophisticated pundits have pointed out, getting sixty votes will still be very difficult on many issues.

Before Specter’s defection, Democrats needed support from all of their caucus, including moderates like Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh, plus two Republican moderates like Specte, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins (with the required number of GOP votes increasing in the number of Democratic defections). That calculus is only slightly more forgiving today. While political science research does show that party switchers tend to substantially alter their voting behavior — an effect that should be even more pronounced given that Specter faces a Democratic primary next year — the net effect of Specter’s switch is likely to be, say, a .4 vote boost on cloture votes for Democratic legislation in the Senate (i.e. Specter votes with the Democrats 75% of the time instead of 35% or whatever). The optics of the switch may be symbolically important, but contrary to Ron Wyden’s claim, the legislative consequences are not likely to be “game-changing.”

Advocates of “enhanced interrogation techniques” tend to cite evidence showing that a detainee provided information after being tortured as if proves their case. But as I noted a few days ago, the key question in the debate over the efficacy of torture (which I abhor under any circumstances) is whether detainees provide more useful intelligence while being tortured than they would have under conventional interrogation. Few people seem to understand this point.

As Kevin Drum points out, President Obama made a similar argument in his press conference last night (emphasis mine):

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve said in the past that waterboarding in your opinion is torture. And torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?

MR. OBAMA: What I’ve said — and I will repeat — is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced that it was the right thing to do — not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways — in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

It’s good to see Obama standing up for the efficacy of conventional interrogation, which is underrated by pundits and apparatchiks who have seen too many episodes of 24.

I’m repulsed that we’re even discussing whether it’s acceptable to waterboard someone 183 times, but the key point in the debate over the effectiveness of torture (as one of Diane Rehm’s guests pointed out Thursday) is whether the “enhanced interrogation techniques” generate new intelligence that would not have been obtained using conventional techniques.

It drives me nuts to hear people claim that we know these techniques work because suspected terrorist X gave us some piece of information after being subjected to torture. Even if those claims were true (many are not), they do not prove that torture works. If the same suspected terrorists would have provided the same information under conventional interrogation in the same amount of time (as former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan claims), then there is no evidence that torture is more effective. However, we do not observe that counterfactual scenario (a problem known as “the fundamental problem of causal inference”) and are thus forced to speculate about what would have happened.

(The debate on this point will almost surely be inconclusive. To evaluate this question scientifically, one would have to unethically randomize prisoners into torture and conventional interrogation conditions. In the absence of such data, both sides are likely to rely on their ideological preconceptions to interpret the anecdotal accounts that are released to the public.)

Max Baucus makes a misleading claim about the effect of the use of the reconciliation process on the sustainability of health care reform in today’s New York Times:

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said Friday that he would prefer not to pursue health legislation through the reconciliation process.

“I think it gets in the way,” Mr. Baucus said, explaining that his goal was to produce a health care bill that could “get significantly more than 60 votes.”

“If we jam something down somebody’s throat, it’s not sustainable,” he said.

In fact, however, the reality is that the status quo is privileged in the American system of government. While it would certainly be possible to overturn a health care bill passed under reconciliation, doing so would require a significant shift in the configuration of the House, Senate, and the presidency. Assuming that reconciliation wasn’t used by a future Republican majority in the Senate to overturn the health care plan, you would need a Republican House majority, a Senate in which the 41st most liberal senator (Claire McCaskill in the 110th Congress) prefered overturning the plan to the status quo, and the election of a Republican president who would not veto the bill. The Senate condition would be somewhat more likely to occur with a more liberal bill, which is the likely result of the use of reconciliation, but it’s hardly a trivial condition.

(To specify this more precisely, you could use a gridlock zone model of the sort developed by Keith Krehbiel, David Brady, and Craig Volden, but assume that the pivotal voters on the bill under reconciliation would be the median members of the House and Senate rather than the filibuster pivot in the Senate. You would then compare the configurations necessary for reversing the bill to the case in which the filibuster pivot in the Senate is the pivotal voter.)

Update 4/27 7:59 AM: Corrected to note the obvious necessity of a Republican House majority to overturning any Democratic health care bill.

Matt Bai chronicles the agonizingly banal Twitter output of our political elites:

Some politicians use Twitter — or, in many cases, have their staff members use it — as a vehicle for their daily message or as a kind of running travelogue. (“Back from Belgium,” Representative Darrell Issa of California tweeted last month. “They make quite a waffle.”) Other politicians have decided that Twitter is a way for us to become immersed in the mundane details of their private lives. The clear leader in this field is Claire McCaskill, Missouri’s junior senator, who took up Twitter just before the inauguration. “I get old style crunchy taco, and a chicken burrito supreme & Diet Coke at Taco Bell,” McCaskill recently tweeted. “Miss those tostados.” Then: “Ok, ok, brain freeze. I know you can only get Diet Pepsi at Taco Bell.”

Issa’s is my favorite. Here are some predictions for Issa tweets after future foreign trips:
-“Back from Sweden. They make quite a meatball.”
-“Back from England. They make quite a muffin.”

Thank goodness technology has made the sharing of these insights possible.

As a former fact-checker, I don’t always agree with Politifact, but it’s a great sign for journalism that they won a Pulitzer last week. Reporters need incentives to go beyond “he said”/”she said” reporting and counter political spin. The Pulitzer committee’s decision is a step in the right direction.

Is it possible that Mark Penn, one of the leading pollsters in America, is a quantitative illiterate?

Penn’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed interpreted a Technorati poll of bloggers in an obviously absurd manner, claiming that “It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.” In fact, the poll found that those bloggers with more than 100,000 unique visitors made an average of $75,000, but the median income in this group was only $22,000.

Here’s Matthew Yglesias summarizing the problems with Penn’s reasoning:

There are all kinds of problems with the statistical inference Mark Penn reaches in this article but just take a gander at this part of Penn’s response to his critics:

The question of how much traffic it takes to make a living also comes from the Technorati report. We say it takes “about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year” and Technorati states those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors the average income is $75,000.

I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get a passing grade on an AP math test making this kind of mistake, much less pass yourself off as a data-crunching expert. Technorati says that the average income of professionals bloggers who have over 100,000 unique visitors per month is $75,000. Penn glosses this as saying that “about 100,000 unique visitors” is enough to earn $75,000 which isn’t even close to being the same thing. The mean earnings of high-traffic bloggers are pretty decent. The median earnings are almost certainly lower. And the earnings of a blogger operating at the low-end of what counts as high-traffic will be lower still.

What’s astonishing is that Penn can charge clients like Hillary Clinton millions of dollars for his insights into polling data (talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations). At some point, the Moneyball-ization of politics will hopefully run people like this out of the profession.

PS This error is so embarrassing/revealing that it would actually be better for Penn if people think he was being intentionally dishonest.

TNR’s Jon Chait offers the definitive take on the bizarre hypocrisy of Karl Rove’s Obama punditry:

The depiction of Barack Obama that has emerged from some quarters of the American right is that of a Bush-like figure. He is irresponsibly running up deficits and covering them up with budgetary gimmickry. Under the guise of healing rhetoric, he ruthlessly pressures fellow partisans in Congress to toe the line. He is “filling White House ranks with former lobbyists,” and his administration is devolving into general incompetence. And he has given unprecedented, Rove-like power to his political Svengali, David Axelrod. Oddly enough, the author of all these particular criticisms is Rove himself.

…Rove, as one would imagine, goes about his task in the bluntest manner, elevating shamelessness to a kind of performance art. He clucks disapprovingly that “senior White House staff meet for two hours each Wednesday evening to digest their latest polling and focus-group research.” The man who described the liberal reaction to September 11 as “offer therapy and understanding for our attackers” now sadly says that Obama “routinely ascribes to others’ views they don’t espouse.” There’s nothing unusual about political hacks becoming hack pundits, but you didn’t find, say, James Carville on CNN accusing George W. Bush of sexually exploiting White House interns.

If you follow Congressional politics, you may have heard the beginnings of a debate among the parties about the potential use of the reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes, as a way for Democrats to avoid a Republican filibuster of a health care bill in the Senate. This is one of those annoying topics on which the parties (and their supporters) switch positions each time control of the majority changes. In this case, Democrats who previously opposed the use of reconciliation for policy changes now support it and vice versa for Republicans.

It’s a debate that’s remarkably short on context — the politicians obviously don’t want to explain the issue in sufficient detail to expose their own hypocrisy and reporters often have a limited understanding of Congressional procedure. That’s why I was happy to see that the political scientists Thomas Mann (Brookings) and Norm Ornstein (AEI) have written a TNR Online article with Molly Reynolds (a Brookings researcher) on the history of reconciliation. Their conclusion? Reconciliation has been exploited by both sides to make policy changes without facing a filibuster:

What is the precedent for using reconciliation to enact major policy changes? Much more extensive than the architects of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 had in mind-or than Senate Republicans are willing to admit these days. Reconciliation was designed as a narrow procedure to bring revenue and direct spending under existing laws into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. It was used initially to cut the budget deficit by increasing revenues or decreasing spending but in more recent years its primary purpose has been to reduce taxes. Twenty-two reconciliation bills were passed between 1980 and 2008, although three (written by Republican majorities in Congress) were vetoed by President Clinton and never became law.

Whether reducing or increasing deficits, many of the reconciliation bills made major changes in policy. Health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, the state Children’s Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform were all enacted under reconciliation procedures. Health reform 2009 style would be the most ambitious use of reconciliation but it fits a pattern used over three decades by both parties to avoid the strictures of Senate filibusters.

They also provide a handy table of all twenty-two bills for historical reference:

Budget Reconciliation Bills Signed Into Law, 1980-2008

Matthew Yglesias highlights the presence of offensive signs at “tea party” protests yesterday and notes that “the TV coverage I saw of the parties didn’t make any mention of the presence of so many signs with a clear racial subtext” (see also Dana Milbank’s report on the DC protest). I have to say I’m bored with offensive sign blogging, which also shows up on conservative blogs after anti-war protests. The problem is that virtually any mass political protest or demonstration attracts crazy people with hateful and offensive signs. A presidential campaign would generally confiscate the worst signs, but decentralized protests (like the “tea parties,” anti-war protests, etc.) usually do not, so where do you draw the line as to when the signs are newsworthy?