Regular readers will remember that for the few months on either side of the new year, I was pert near hysterical about the Debt Ceiling. And there is a reason for that: it is really important. If the United States defaults on its debts, this will cause our borrowing costs to go up. People (conservatives especially) like to focus on our total debt. But debt itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is how much it costs to service that debt. Everyone understands this in their own lives. That’s why people like to get credit cards with 10% interest rates rather than 25% interest rates. Right now, the United States has one of the lowest debt service costs it has ever had since World War II.

But the exact same conservatives who claim to be so worried about the debt don’t seem to have any concern at all that they could double the yearly cost of that debt with their idea of breaching the Debt Ceiling. I’m not the only person worried about this, of course. Ezra Klein has been equally concerned in his neutral, wonky way. And today he reported on the House Republican establishment arguing with the rank and file about not shutting down the govern and instead threatening a debt ceiling crisis. As Klein notes, “Trading a government shutdown for a debt-ceiling breach is like trading the flu for septic shock.” That’s absolutely right.

I think he also gets the internal politics right. The establishment knows that a government shutdown and a debt ceiling breach would be bad for the Republican Party. But the shutdown threat comes first, so they use whatever argument they can to avoid that. When the debt ceiling crisis comes, well, they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it. He further explains:

The question is why the rank and file House Republicans (and much of the base) feel as they do. This isn’t just that it’s a bummer to be in the minority. As I’ve written about again and again and again, the Republicans are no longer a normal political party and have become a revolutionary group. There are many aspects of this. But the main thing is the quasi-religious belief structure. I wrote only yesterday regarding Louisiana Republicans blaming Obama for Hurricane Katrina, “It is no longer the case that Obama is a president Republicans disagree with; he is the president who is hell bent on destroying the one true America that each Republican just somehow divines.” For the revolutionary, it is always a crisis; nothing else justifies their extreme tactics.

Think of me. I’m very politically engaged. I think politics matters. In fact, I think that income inequality is a life and death matter. And I am not above histrionics. But I’m no revolutionary. I agree with John Dickinson in 1776 when he says, “If you have grievances, and I’m sure you have, our present system must provide a gentler means of redressing them short of revolution.” And I agree with that knowing full well that we don’t live in a democracy. But things are not so bad that we should destroy the whole system. The more extreme Republicans want to do exactly that, although they would claim that they want to take America back to some previous time when it was pure. (And never existed.)

So given the crisis that Republicans see, any political tactic, no matter now extreme is valid. They aren’t thinking about the next election; they are in a life and death struggle where they fancy themselves as Churchill, the Republican establishment as Chamberlain, and Obama as Hitler. And it is all made concrete with Obamacare. The truth is that now is the final fight. Once implemented, resistance to the law will quickly die out. I don’t say that because it’s going to be wonderful. But the conservative movement has set expectations so high that if 2014 doesn’t bring Armageddon, people will be relieved. And given that Obamacare has been trumpeted as the greatest threat to personal freedom since Stalin, the religious fervor is understandable.

I believe this could all lead to a debt ceiling breach. The stakes for conservatives really are that high—or at least they think they are. And as a liberal, I know that it would be good for my cause in the long term. But also as a liberal, I know it would be terrible for the people in the short and medium term. As I said: I’m not a revolutionary. So I do hope that the Republicans remain sane on this issue and do what is in their own best interests. For once, their best interests are the same as the nation’s.

Slate has an advise columnist Emily Yoffe who writes a column Dear Prudence. As advice columns goes, it isn’t bad. And I have to admit, I get drawn into the articles more than I would like. Today’s was fairly typical, Help! My Father Is Dying of Lung Cancer From Smoking. Didn’t He Get What He Deserves? Actually, that wasn’t the headline; it was the link text for the article on another page, but it works better than the actual headline. Basically, the writer, who goes by “Slow Suicide Is Still Suicide,” wants to know how he can “feign polite concern” because he’s angry at his father for choosing cigarettes over his family all these years.

Prudence is very nice with “Slow.” My natural tendency is just to say, “Shut up you whiny asshole!” But Prudence goes step by step. The father is 77 now, which is older than most men when they die. Most people of his age smoked so maybe he should have a little sympathy. And regardless, after he’s dead, Slow is going to regret spending all these last moments seething. All of which doesn’t really answer the question, but is a polite way of saying, “Shut the fuck up!”

I have a more fundamental problem with Slow Suicide Is Still Suicide. And it starts with his moniker. Are we to conclude that people who commit suicide deserve no sympathy? Did they get what they deserved? Regardless, all of us humans do things that are not in our objective best interests. We don’t eat what we should. We don’t get enough exercise. We don’t pay enough attention when we drive. It is just our current culture that has decided that there are certain bad behaviors that others have a right to be total assholes about. In our society, there are two things: drugs and obesity. Those are two things that allow us to disregard our shared humanity and not care at all.

With drugs, as with just about everything, the issue is the dose. I really don’t like cigarettes. In fact, I think that smoking is a really vile way to get anything into your body. But the bad effects of cigarette smoking come from the excessive level of smoking. It is not at all clear that smoking a couple of cigarettes per day is a bad thing. Smoking 40 per day most clearly is. I’ll admit, our society tends to be all or nothing. But that’s all the more reason to be sympathetic to the chain smoker.

In the case of obesity, it turns out being reasonably “overweight” is more healthy than being “normal.” And that gets us back to Slow Suicide Is Still Suicide. There is little doubt that his father’s smoking did lead to his cancer. But that’s not why Slow feels so morally superior and correct in his callous reaction to his father’s illness. It’s all about cultural signaling. We divide people into those who deserve sympathy and those who do not. And those divisions are only vaguely related to the truth of the situation. In fact, in most cases it is far worse than that. Our whole idea of meritocracy is based on the idea that the rich deserve their wealth and the poor deserve their poverty.

What do we have other than empathy? Everything else is a mixed bag. Intelligence, for example, leads to cancer cures but also nuclear warheads. It isn’t as though I don’t understand where Slow is coming from. Friends and family can be aggravating. But Slow only thinks it is okay to sneer at his father’s pain because he thinks that society allows it. The man is dying. And Slow is being an asshole.

I am entering dangerous waters. You see, I am a man. And other than the whole testicle thing (Bad design, God!) I’m fairly happy being a man. You see, as much as I may not be some kind of testosterone fueled idiot, I am, in my way, quite dominant in relationships. Or more to the point, in the only way that I really care about—intellectually—I tend to dominate relationships. And that has generally been true of my romantic adventures, even if some of the women aren’t aware of it.[1] But having said that, as much as I am okay with the modern state of sexual politics, I think that women get the worse of it.

This is mostly manifested in the way that the home is run. Even when the man was the primary breadwinner, this situation sucked for women. As the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.” And it isn’t! But now the standard situation is that the woman goes off to work for eight or so hours and then comes home and works. As far as I can tell, the only real social improvement in this regard is that it has become far more acceptable for women to be lazy. But a dirty (or even messy) house is still looked down upon. And the whole situation eventually leads to which person is most accepting of a dirty bathtub. Most men won’t even notice until there is a quart inch of black mold covering the thing.

So it is not at all surprising that despite years of feminist gains, men still pay most of the dating bills. Randye Hoder reported on a recent study that found that in general, men feel that they should pay for dates and women are just fine with that. Still, it is all a game. Most men prefer to date women who at least try to pay for some things. In fact, 44% said they would stop seeing a woman who never did so. (Yeah, right!) Similarly, a solid majority of woman do offer to pay, although 39% say they secretly hope that the offer will not be accepted. And fully 76% of men who want women to offer to pay feel guilty if they accept the money.

I have a really cynical take on this. In my experience, many women will insist upon paying for some stuff. And (whether intentionally or not) they use this to justify the claim that they pay for half the stuff the couple does. Let’s see now. We go out of town and I pay for the car, the hotel, the food, and she pays for one round of drinks. Yeah, that’s about equal! Look: in fact, we are equal. Back at home, I will not vacuum until the dust is so think I hydroplane through the kitchen. Without her, every plant in the house will die and the front lawn will catch on fire after even weeds won’t grow on it. When I am alone, things will go so bad in the refrigerator that the neighbors will complain about the smell. So if a woman provides the support I need to live something like a civilized life, we are at least even and most likely, I’m far ahead of the game.

But part of the deal with being a man is pretending that we really are being Lancelot with a beer in the living room watching Charley Varrick. That’s why I’ve always loved buying flowers and dresses and other assorted presents for my lady friends. Because it makes me feel great! And yes, I know I’m a jerk about it. But if you ladies all want to turn lesbian, I totally understand. However, if you want to have relationships with the weaker sex, that’s the deal. In the past, we brought home dead rabbits even though you had spent the whole day collecting the fruit that was 90% of our diet. Just like you did then, you pretend that you would be lost without us.

And then you go back to work because not only is a woman’s work never done, but they’re showing Pulp Fiction uncut on TCM tonight and I really don’t want to miss that.

Update (22 August 2013 2:39 pm)

Matt Yglesias made an excellent point:

[1] For the record, I am greedy and selfish when it comes to knowledge. Thus in any new relationship, I tend to be a taker. Those people may come away thinking I don’t know a thing, but it’s only because they came away not learning a thing. I’m not proud of this, but as Popeye said, “I yam what I yam.” Oh, one other thing: saying that I’m intellectually dominant is not the same as saying that I’m smarter. Most women I’ve been with have been smarter than I. But in our culture, women are such intellectual underachievers. Or they are just very aware that all the men would kill themselves if the women allowed them to know that their only real social function was as sperm donors.

I like the birthday posts, but they are a pain to do. On a normal day, it takes two hours or so to do. I do enjoy checking out a new painter, listening to music, trying to figure out what some obscure mathematician was on about. But time is precious and most days I don’t feel like I have the time to do in properly. Just so you know. I still plan to keep it up for the whole year.

On this day in 1725, the great French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze was born. The great French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was born in 1789. French organic chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt was born in 1816. Three great Frenchmen in one paragraph.

Comparative biologist Karl Gegenbaur was born in 1826. Art Nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley was born in 1872. Animator Friz Freleng was born in 1905. Novelist M. M. Kaye was born in 1908. The great Soviet quantum field theorist Nikolay Bogolyubov was born in 1909.

Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920. I’ll let you figure out who he is. One of the great heroes of my youth, Wilt Chamberlain was born in 1936. And the great Joe Strummer was born in 1952. He would only be 61 today. Sad. Here he is with The Only Band That Matters doing their biggest hit:

Co-founder of the Church of the SubGenius, Ivan Stang is 60 today. Actor Kim Cattrall is 57. I’ve had a crush on her ever since Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. (I’ve always had a thing for nubile Vulcans.) Another science fiction heartthrob, actor Carrie-Anne Moss is 46. (What nerd could not have a crush on her, although Belinda McClory is a close second.) Just to finish off this suite of crushes, is my current biggest crush, actor Joanne Froggatt who is 33. I don’t think she’s an especially beautiful woman. It is just that she plays Anna on Downton Abbey. And she falls in love and is steadfast to an older handicapped man with a dodgy background. How could I not crush on her? (Like a high school boy, I have her picture on my desktop.)

And the greatest sprinter of all time, Usain Bolt is 27 today. He made lots of news on this most recent Olympics, but he’s been huge for a long time. Of course, I only knew about him because of the screenplay I was writing that dealt with an older man sprinting. Anyway, it’s very interesting, but it is hard to think that sprinters are anything but born, even if you do believe in free will.

The day, however, belongs to the great jazz composer and musician Count Basie who was born on this day in 1904. He is best known as a big band leader. But I am most fond of his trio. Here he is at the Montreaux Jazz Festival in 1977:

And here he is with his “theme” the “One O’Clock Jump”:

Happy birthday Count Basie!

If you are still laughing from my previous suggestion that Peggy Noonan might be in favor of single payer healthcare reform, get ready. Talking Points Memo had Public Policy Polling (PPP) conduct a survey of Louisiana Republicans. Most of the poll was pretty standard stuff. For example, we find that the younger members of this group really like Rand Paul for president in 2016 while the older members really like Jeb Bush. But as is PPP’s wont, they threw in some crazy questions too, including, “Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?” You know this one’s gonna be good, right?

More Louisiana Republicans blame Barack Obama. Now this makes sense. While it is true that Obama had been in the Illinois state legislator up through the beginning of 2005, he had already been in Congress for 7 whole months at that time of the Hurricane. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was only at the end of his fifth year as president. Of course it was Obama’s fault! Isn’t everything?

In fairness, the results are close. George Bush was blamed by 28% and Obama by 29%. More striking is that 44% were just not sure. I wasn’t even especially paying attention to politics at that time, but I remember clearly who was president. I even remember, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” I would think that people in Louisiana would remember. But maybe it is just due to the fact that so many of the poor people in Louisiana were forced out of the state.

Drilling down into the data makes the picture clearer. Other than those few Republicans who claim to be liberal, large percentages mostly just don’t know who to blame for the terrible federal government response to Hurricane Katrina. But at least among those under 65, a distinct plurality recognize that Bush was in fact president at that time. Of course, that means among those over 65, the numbers look really bad. Of this group, 42% blame Obama for the response and only 24% blame Bush. I believe in respecting our elders (Especially as I become one!) but this is just terrible.

Now look: I understand. A large part of this is just a reflexive dislike of Obama. But I have a hard time believing that Democrats are this clueless. And I still think that Democrats are very clueless! Imagine a poll of Democrats in 1985 that asked, “Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to the Iran hostage crisis: Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan?” I know that many liberals would bristle at the question because it is not clear that Carter’s response was poor. But I doubt that more liberals would have blamed Reagan than Carter.

This gets to the very heart of what is wrong with the Republican Party. It doesn’t particularly believe anything and so its base of voters is just against whatever the Democrats are for. As I’ve noted before, it is no longer the case that Obama is a president Republicans disagree with; he is the president who is hell bent on destroying the one true America that each Republican just somehow divines. If that really were true, their behavior would be understandable. I would like to think that I would not have been willing to compromise with Hitler. But Obama most certainly is not the America destroy of Republican myth. Obama (on economic policy at least) is a good old fashioned conservative. It is only in the Republican echo chamber that he is a pernicious threat to America. But at this point, the echo chamber seems to be the only thing the Republicans have left.

But I do hope that Obama does a better job with the next Hurricane Katrina.

Afterword

Speaking of laughing, Steve Benen very slyly noted that there is little Republicans would not blame Obama for:

It certainly would be for the best if Obama stopped betting on baseball.

There’s been a bit of discussion of a blog post from Peggy Noonan last week, The High Cost of ObamaCare. Ezra Klein has a full take down of it. Basically, Noonan doesn’t understand how part of Obamacare, Community First Choice, works. So she complains that Obamacare is not doing what Obamacare does do. She says that it should do exactly what it is doing. The horror!

I was very struck by the overall point of the article. According to her, Obamacare is a complicated mess. We should just start over. But how? She explains, “When a thousand things have to be changed about a law to make it workable, some politician is going to stand up and say: ‘This was a noble effort in the right direction but let’s do the right thing and simplify everything, with a transparent and understandable plan: single payer.’ Will that be Mrs. Clinton’s theme in 2016?” Is Peggy Noonan calling for single payer healthcare?

Okay. Okay. Stop laughing. Wipe the tears from your eyes. There’s still a lot of article left to read.

This is clearly a gambit. What Noonan is hoping to do is get liberal support for a repeal of Obamacare. That isn’t a completely insane idea. After all, there are a lot of liberals (Like me!) who really dislike Obamacare. But clearly, what Noonan is hoping is that with the help of liberals, the Republicans can repeal Obamacare. But after it’s gone, Hillary Clinton (for example) wouldn’t have overwhelming majorities in Congress and so we would get the preferred Republican plan: nothing. (Not even the fee for the gaming license.)

I run into a less calculated version of this gambit from conservatives all the time. Especially since Obamacare has become law, the big complaint about it is that it is so complicated. As Noonan says, it has “10 million moving parts.” These conservatives always say more or less the same thing, “Why can’t we have something simple.” And they are open minded about single payer. I don’t doubt that they are genuine in what they claim. (That’s clearly not true of Noonan!) They’ve all been told so much how terrible Obamacare is that they figure single payer could be no worse.

These same open minded conservatives would quickly close their minds to single payer, however. Charles Krauthammer would inform them all of the truth: single payer really is much more socialized medicine than Obamacare was. And suddenly, “complexity” would not be the rationale for opposing healthcare reform. It would instantly switch to something about a homosexual zombie orgy led by Stalin and Hitler.

Always be leery of conservatives who claim to be for reasonable reforms like these. In this specific case, it isn’t that conservatives don’t like Obamacare on the merits. They are just looking for a reason—Any reason!—to block it. The only healthcare “reform” policies that they are for are things that they’ve wanted to do for other reasons for a long time, like tort “reform.” If you think Noonan is disingenuous and hysterical now, just wait until Hillary Clinton proposes single payer. I can just hear her now, “Just because single payer is simple, doesn’t mean this socialist takeover of the healthcare industry is a good idea! At least Obamacare relied on the private sector!”

Jonathan Chait wrote a really annoying article yesterday. It isn’t that I disagree with him necessarily. Rather, it is that he puts forth the commonest of common wisdom as though he’s being an iconoclast. His big insight: the Republicans will keep control of the House. He’s really put himself out on a limb there!

Mostly, he’s pushing back on some commentary from people like Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. They’ve argued that the business community is none too happy with the House Republicans. And Chait is right to ridicule this. I already did last week, Hoping Won’t Make Chamber of Commerce Hate GOP. But what’s really going on here? It’s August in Washington; Congress is in recess; what’s a Politico reporter to do?

But there has been a reasonable change of opinion about the 2014 Congressional election. Before, following from the stupid idea of the six-year curse, people thought the Democrats would lose big. But now, as I wrote in The Next Three Election Cycles, it looks like the Republicans will make minor gains in both chambers.

Chait is at his most silly in discussing immigration reform. I don’t understand these mainstream liberals and their fascination with this issue. He claims that by not passing comprehensive (but mostly pathetically tepid, overwhelmingly pro-business) reform, the Republican Party brand will be poisoned for decades among Latinos. I’m not clear on the whole notion of party “brands” and loyalties. The African American community was loyal to the Republican Party for so long, not because of Lincoln, but because the Democratic Party stayed explicitly racist into the 1960s. If the Republican Party changed its policies, Latinos would vote for it.

Of course, the issues that Latinos care about are not exclusively immigration. In fact, it is at least a little offensive that these liberal white guy reporters focus so much on this issue. What it shows is that they are not the one thing that most defines the Latino community: poor. Yes, it is certainly true that the explicitly racist elements of the party hurt its standing with Latinos. Comprehensive immigration reform is not the end all, be all. Mostly it is simply a matter that Republican policies are designed to harm the poor and limit their opportunities.

Chait ends his article by making an analogy with the Republicans of the late 1990s and how it took 6 years of George W Bush for the Republicans to lose control of Congress. That’s true, but he conveniently forgets that there was not a demographic tidal wave sweeping over American politics at that point. I still maintain that the Republicans will not go down easily. But to suggest that the Republicans can keep doing what they’re doing and that it will take 6 years of President Rand Paul before they pay a price for it is madness. Let’s not forget, Bush didn’t win the 2000 election and wouldn’t have won the 2004 election without 9/11. None of which means that the Republicans won’t continue to find ways to win. But to suggest that they will by default is just the smug spouting of conventional wisdom.

On this day in 1561, Renaissance composer Jacopo Peri was born. Unlike most composers of that period, his work is still quite listenable. Here is his Tu Dormi, e ‘l Dolce Sonno:

Mathematician Thomas Simpson, inventor of the numerical integral solution the Simpson’s rule (shockingly simple), was born in 1710. Late Baroque composer Bernard de Bury was born in 1720. He wrote for the stage, but most of what you can find recorded these days is for the harpsichord. And the harpsichord is not exactly an expressive instrument. But this is all right, I suppose: Chaccone.

One of the founders of modern chemistry Jons Jacob Berzelius was born in 1779. People’s Poet, Edgar Guest was born in 1881. He was called “people’s poet” because, in all frankness, he’s fun to listen to and read.

Writer with one of the coolest names ever, Salvatore Quasimodo was born in 1901. Producer and songwriter Isaac Hayes was born in 1942. Here is the song he will always be remembered by:

We can dig it!

And the great Greek singer-songwriter Nikolas Asimos was born in 1949. Here he is doing “Varethika.” I have no idea what it means, but it is incredibly compelling:

Typical idiotic libertarian Ron Paul is 78. We can all thank God that Robert Plant is 65 and so we will never have to see him again. But here he is at the front of Led Zeppelin dong one of the greatest rock songs ever (mostly because of Jimmy Page):

The great singer-songwriter John Hiatt is 61. It is really hard to pick a single song of his because he’s written so many great ones. But here—Almost at random!—is “Master of Disaster” (although you could check him out with the super group Little Village):

Actor Joan Allen is 57. One half of Little Britain, David Walliams is 42. And actor Amy Adams is 39.

The day, however, belongs to the great writer H. P. Lovecraft who was born on this day in 1890. Although most people have never read him, he is hugely important—certainly as important as Edgar Allan Poe. His fiction is quite well summed up by Wikipedia as being guided by “the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind.” Can you see why I admire him? This gets to my big disagreement with my spiritual thinking friends. I like their open-mindedness. But none of them seem to get the fundamental insight: we humans are Very Small Animals who are hopelessly parochial. We cannot understand the universe.

Another reason for my interest in Lovecraft is that he was so critical to the EC Comics that I grew up loving. Regardless, here is a nice short video about who the man was and a rather simplistic notion of why he’s important:

Happy birthday H. P. Lovecraft!

From Classic Taco, here is what I think is the best If Movie Posters Were Honest:

I haven’t written much about “stop and frisk” because it is so clearly unconstitutional and I’ve gotten so used to clearly unconstitutional laws being upheld by our courts. But I was very pleased when Judge Shira Scheindlin wrote her opinion finding that the program was unconstitutional. How it took 11 years to get to this point, I’m not sure. But this is a good thing.

Of course, the decision brought Ray Kelly and Michael Bloomberg out of their intellectual sewers to complain about the ruling. Both men have rolled out their propaganda machines and are ready for war. Bloomberg mostly makes his typical fascist arguments. It isn’t racial profiling if young black men do commit more crimes! He would have us believe that he is an “independent,” but notice that he is one of those amazing creatures who turned from Democrat into Republican even as the Democratic Party became more conservative and the Republican Party went sprinting for the “fascists enter here” sign.

Both men are rather good at lying with statistics. For example, Bloomberg used a statistic that showed that at least 6% of all stops were unjustified to claim that only 6% were unjustified. Scheindlin’s ruling explicitly stated that the number was likely far higher than this. But even if the number is valid, what does that mean? Is it okay for the government to outlaw Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the grounds that it is only a small percentage of the number of books published? That one really gets to the heart of where Bloomberg and people like him are coming from.

By far the worst statement is one by Kelly that sounds really good, “In the last 11 years, 11 full years of the Bloomberg administration, there were 7,363 fewer murders in New York City than there were in the preceding 11 years. Now, if history is any guide, those lives saved are largely the lives of young men of color.” Except that the actual data look very different:

The “stop and frisk” program started in 2003. Admittedly, violent crime has gone down a bit since then. But it is nothing like the decrease in crime before the program started. It looks like the drop in crime is part of a longer trend that is due to something other than the “stop and frisk” program.

To a large extent, I think that Kelly feels he is just doing his job and that includes defending this program. Bloomberg is the far bigger villain here. For one thing, he’s more hyperbolic. And I get the impression that this isn’t even about the program. He’s at the end of his career and at this point New Yorkers are finally having buyer’s remorse. Let’s face it: he’s been a bad thing for New York. Liberals get confused by politicians like Bloomberg and Christie because they make nice on social issues. But the social issues really do take care of themselves. You either get onboard the gay rights train or it will run you over. It says nothing of these mean that they are somewhat okay on the issue. The economic and criminal justice issues are the killers and on those issues, these men are as conservative as a Texas pig farmer.

So it isn’t surprising that regardless of how nice conservative politicians sound, when in power, they will aggressively push the most vile of policies. Why it has taken the people of New York three terms to learn this I cannot say.

In Politico this morning, Richard A. Arenberg wrote an incredibly ignorant, but Serious sounding centrist defense of minority obstruction, Save the filibuster! As I’ve been predicting, the Republican minority in the Senate is refusing to confirm any of the existing DC Federal Circuit Court vacancies. And so Harry Reid is again talking about the so called nuclear option. There is a lot of false equivalence implicit in Arenberg’s argument. His claim is that what the Republicans are doing is terrible but it would be even more terrible if Reid did something about it.

Let’s think about that. I’m sure that Arenberg thinks he is taking the center position, but he is not. He is completely siding with the Republicans on this one. He tut-tuts the Republicans but does not want to do anything to stop them from doing what he claims to be against. And in his mind, there seems to be no amount of misbehavior on the part of Republicans that would justify doing anything. But I suppose that is to be expected; that’s what the professional centrists do.

He counters the argument that a very small percentage of the population can stop any legislation. This is in reference to a claim by Common Cause that only 11% of the population would be necessary to filibuster a bill. Arenberg says that we could look at it from the other side and note that only 17% of the population could be a minority. There are two things wrong with argument. First, the fact that the Senate is a ridiculously undemocratic institution is not an argument for making it even more undemocratic. Second, the Republicans really will destroy the filibuster the moment they get the chance. I don’t see how all the centrists miss this point.

But the core of his argument is that the founding fathers wanted to guard against the “tyranny of the majority.” That’s true, but that has nothing to do with the way the Senate was set up. It was set up that way as a compromise to the smaller states. And even then the disparities were nowhere near as bad as they are today. Now we have states like Wyoming that have total populations that are one-tenth that of reasonable sized cities. California is 66 times the size of Wyoming! And even at the time, the founding fathers were none too keen on how undemocratic the Senate was. And they specifically did not require super-majority support for normal legislation as they did for things like treaties.

Matt Yglesias pointed out that Arenberg completely misunderstands the notion of minority protections. The filibuster is not about minority rights because, as we often see, the Senate minority uses the filibuster to stop minority rights:

At this point, I don’t see how anyone can be against filibuster reform for rational reasons. If you really are against democracy—as many conservatives are—then you might support the filibuster. But for people like Arenberg, it is just about being in the perceived center and assuming that however things are is how they ought to be. And that’s just madness: apologetics for the most extreme excesses of the modern Republican Party.