On June 21, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi will hold its fifty-first memorial service for three young civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan at the start of the Freedom Summer. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were activists who planned to create a voting rights school at the church, located in rural Neshoba County.
The post Murders in rural Mississippi: remembering tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement appeared first on OUPblog.
By Andrew Dobson
“Noisy and aggressive,” “childish,” “over the top,” “pointless.” These are just a few recent descriptions of Prime Minister’s Questions – the most watched event in the Parliamentary week.
Public dismay at PMQs has led the Speaker, John Bercow, to consult with party leaders over reform. The Hansard Society asked focus groups what they thought of PMQs as part of its annual look at public engagement. Nearly half said the event is “too noisy and aggressive”, the same proportion as those who felt that MPs behave unprofessionally. Meanwhile, a majority of 33% to 27% reported that it put them off politics. Only 12% said it made them “proud of our Parliament”.
John Bercow. By Office of John Bercow CC-BY-SA-3.0
Both the Deputy Prime Minister Clegg and Labour leader
Ed Miliband agreed that the baying and screeching gave politics and politicians a bad name, and while Prime Minister David Cameron was a little more guarded,
he too thought that Mr Bercow’s ideas were interesting and worth looking at.
So would it help if politicians listened to each other little bit more and shouted at each other a little bit less? The fact that PMQs is simultaneously the most watched and the least respected Parliamentary event is significant. No doubt we watch it precisely because we enjoy the barracking and the bawling, and there is always the possibility of grudging admiration for a smart bit of wordplay by one or other of the combatants. Parliamentary sketch writers nearly always judge the winner of PMQs on the basis of which of the party leaders has bested the other in terms of quips and ripostes – and very rarely on the basis of political substance.
So it’s hardly an informative occasion. Indeed the Hansard’s respondents’ main gripes are that questions are scripted, and that there are too many planted questions and too few honest answers.
Once again, though, maybe this misses the point. Some will say that the civilised and serious political work is done behind the scenes in committee rooms, where party loyalty is less obviously on display, and where considered debate often takes place. On this account, PMQs occupy a very small amount of parliamentary time, and anyway, the sometimes angry jousting that takes place between party leaders on Wednesdays is as much a part of politics as the polite exchange of views we find in Parliamentary committees. Where would politics be without disagreement? Would it be politics at all?
But then there are different ways of disagreeing – and some ways could turn out to be exclusionary. One of the ideas floated by John Bercow was that the flight of women from the House of Commons was in part a result of the way in which debate is conducted there.
David Cameron. By World Economic Forum/Moritz Hager (Flickr) CC-BY-SA-2.0
And it’s a fact that although good listening is much prized in daily conversation, it’s been almost completely ignored in the form of political conversation we know as democracy. While PMQs show that politicians aren’t always very good at listening to each other, they’re not much better at listening to the public either. Politicians instinctively know that listening in a democracy is vital to legitimacy. That’s why when they’re in trouble they reach for the listening card and initiate a “Big Conversation,” like the one
Tony Blair started in late 2003, not so many months after the million people march against the Iraq war.
But won’t a government that listens hard and changes its mind just be accused of that ultimate political crime, the U-turn? In 2012, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, announced some radical changes in UK secondary school education, including a return to an older style assessment regime. Then in February 2013 he suddenly announced that the changes wouldn’t take place after all. Predictably, the Opposition spokesman called this a ‘humiliating climbdown’. Equally predictably, Gove’s supporters played the listening card for it was worth, with Nick Clegg saying effusively that, “There is no point having a consultation if you’ve already made up your mind what you’re going to do at the end of it.”
So it looks as though, as far as listening goes, governments are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: accused of weakness if they change their mind and of pig-headedness and a failure to listen if they don’t. On balance, I’d rather have them listening more – both to each other and to us. John Dryzek is surely right to say that, “the most effective and insidious way to silence others in politics is a refusal to listen.”
As the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus says: “Nature hath given men and one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
Andrew Dobson is Professor of Politics at Keele University, UK. His most recent book is Listening for Democracy: recognition, representation, reconciliation (OUP, 2014). He is a member of the England and Wales Green Party and he co-wrote the Green Party General Election Manifesto in 2010. He is a founder member of the thinktank Green House.
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Image credit: John Bercow, by Office John Bercow, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) David Cameron, by World Economic Forum/Mortiz Hager (Flickr), CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The post Prime Minister’s Questions appeared first on OUPblog.
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at political wrangling in D.C. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
This week will be the most challenging week of Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership to date. With the President postponing his overseas trip and scheduled to give a healthcare speech in Ohio on Monday, one could be mistaken to think that it is the bully pulpit that could/would save the day for health-care reform.
It is not. Public opinion is very fluid in this moment, and in any case the presidential office is ill-suited toward convincing individual congressional districts and individual House members. At a time like this, votes in Congress and not votes in town halls are what count. More specifically, Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to lose more than 37 Democratic members of the House of Representatives assuming that every member votes and every Republican votes against the Senate’s $875 billion health-care bill passed on Christmas eve and coming up for consideration by the House next week. Right now, about 34 members (according to the Hill’s Whip ) are either on the firm or leaning “no” column.
Obama’s pulpit may at best change the national sentiment on healthcare reform, but he cannot change the majority opinion of individual districts with a public speech, much less an individual lawmaker’s mind. To do that, the Speaker and her whips operate behind the scene, conducting the business of what Ronald Reagan called the second oldest profession of the world, hoping that the magic she worked to get the 220 Democratic votes for the House version of the health-care bill in November will work again.
Obama, for his part, is not hanging around the country just to give public speeches. He knows (or should know) that styrofoam corinthian pillars aren’t going to be enough this time. His real challenge next week is to convince nearly every one of the 72 or so undecided or publicly unpledged Democratic representatives that the Senate will indeed live up to its promise to pass a reconciliation bill amending the provisions of the bill (such as the “Louisiana Purchase”) that House members find objectionable. When push comes to shove, the Constitution is quite clear that the public doesn’t matter, because only lawmakers have the vote to make law.
So who are these undecided or publicly unpledged members that Obama and Pelosi need to convince? The truth is the liberals who want a public option will ultimately come on board, and those who oppose the abortion language in the Senate bill have already been lost when the Speaker decided to go without most of them. (That the Speaker is no longer talking to Bart Stupak and his 11 colleagues suggests that Pelosi is either at the end of her tether with the abortion folks or confident that she can get her votes elsewhere.) So the biggest chunk of undecideds are the moderate Democrats who worry about the cost of the reform package. This is why all are awaiting the CBO scores on the cost of the health-care bill, which are expected on Monday afternoon. Expecting that more time will be needed to cajole the faint-hearted, the Speaker has provisioned three extra days from the original March 18 dea
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
Ideological purists do not believe in reconciliation. Conservatives would rather rely on private acts of kindness than the state to deliver health-care services. Hence their characterization of bureaucrats as cold and remorseless (such as when they’re on “death panels”). Liberals, for their part, believe that it is heinous to make a patient in need of care wait for private charity. Hence their tremendous faith in the helping hand of the state. For the conservatives, the market is benign but the state is monstrous; for liberals, the state is virtuous and the market is immoral.
Partisans and political parties, on the other hand, must reconcile themselves to median voters and therefore to each other if they are to have any chance of survival. That is why in their discussion of health-care reform, most Republicans and Democrats have ceded fundamental tenets of their ideology. In their concurrence with the Republicans in addressing a social issue in cost-cutting and job-creating terms and in eschewing a single-payer system, Democrats have proven that they are not really socialist. In reminding seniors of the potential cuts to Medicare should the Democrats try to cover the uninsured, Republicans have shown that they are not pure laissez faire anti-statists either.
It is in this muddied ideological context that we should view the parliamentary measure called Reconciliation which Democrats are bracing to deploy in the weeks to come to pass health-care reform. Reconciliation may be procedurally draconian because it bypasses the Senate filibuster, but it crystallizes the idea shared by Congressional leaders who pushed through the Budget and Impoundment Control Act in 1974 that legislative output (sound or unsound, one might add) is more important than consensus. It is no wonder that Reconciliation has often been used to pass legislation on the divisive issues in American politics which typically straddle the state/market-solution divide. These include health insurance portability (COBRA, 1985), expanded Medicaid eligibility (1987), welfare reform (1996), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP, 1997), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, 2005). Perhaps the Democrats could have saved themselves a year of trying to make history and a lot of political capital if they had realized that almost every welfare and health-care bill passed in the last three decades was achieved via Reconciliation.
Although Republicans say it is the nuclear option, no real destruction followed after each of the 22 times the measure has been used (with two-thirds of the time by Republicans.) Reconciliation doesn’t only reconcile items on the federal budget, but its supporters on either side of the aisle (when it suits them) also believe that the measure also reconciles the Founders’ sometimes contradictory commitment to deliberation and debate and their desire for legislative output and government. Reconciliation has been used before, and it will likely be used again, rather soon.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/23/2010
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
After attempting a pivot to jobs, the Obama administration has realized that a hanging cadence on health-care will not do. Perhaps they should never have started it, but closure is what the administration now must have. An encore after the strident audacity of hope on health-care reform was temporarily dashed after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate.
In the immediate aftermath of that election, Democrats were in danger of exchanging over-confidence for excessive humility. After Obama’s historic election the year before and Arlen Specter’s party switch, Democrats were overtaken by hubris that Obama’s tune of change could be used to overturn Washington and to compel it toward a Progressive utopia. But just as Democrats were foolhardy to think that 60 votes in the Senate gave them invincible power, they somehow thought after the Massachusetts Senate election that 59 made them completely impotent.
In the media, we hear, conversely, about the conservative comeback in hyperbolic terms. On Saturday, Glenn Beck, not Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, delivered the keynote speech in the largest annual conservative gathering, the CPAC conference. If Beck’s stardom exceeds that of the winner of the CPAC straw poll this year, Ron Paul, it is because the conservative movement, charged as it is, remains a movement in search of a leader. It is also a movement, as Beck’s criticism of Progressive Republicans in his speech reveals, which is not exactly in sync with the Republican party – the only machine capable of taking down liberal dreams.
And so a Democratic comeback on health-care reform is afoot. With one vote shy of a fillibuster-proof majority, Senator Harry Reid has opened the door to the Budget Reconciliaton process that more Progressive advocates of health-care reform like Governor Howard Dean have been pushing for a while. While it is not clear that there are 50 votes in the Senate for the public option, assuming that Vice-President Biden will cast the 51st, what is clear is that Democrats are much more likely to push through a liberal bill with the veto pivot sliding to the left by ten Senators.
In the White House too, we see a coordinated move to bring Reconciliation back as an option. Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to lay the ground work when he warned that “in time, we’ll see these skyrocketing health care costs become the single largest driver of our federal deficits.” He said this because in order to use Reconciliation, Democrats must show a relationship between health-care reform and balancing the federal budget.
No one in Washington believes that Thursday’s Health-care Summit will magically generate a consensus when in the past year there has been nothing but partisan bickering. If so, the President is not being naive, but signali
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on 8/11/2009
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and 
author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at reconciliation. See his previous OUPblogs here.
There is a lot of hushed talk about using the Reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform in the Congress these days, so Americans need to know something about this obscure parliamentary procedure, and what is at stake.
Reconciliation is an optional, deficit-reducing procedure that was created in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The Reconciliation process is a two-stage process. First, Reconciliation directives must be included in the annual Budget Resolution (as they were in the 2010 Budget Resolution passed on April 29). These directives instruct the relevant Congressional committees to develop (in this case, health-care) legislation by a specific date (in this case, October 15) to meet certain spending or revenue targets. The instructed committees then send their legislative recommendations to their respective Budget Committees, who then package all recommendations into one omnibus Reconciliation bill. Enter Stage 2, when this bill is then considered on the floor of both chambers of Congress under expedited procedures; of greatest political note is the 20-hour limit on debate on any Reconciliation measure, which effectively strips the minority party of the filibustering option in the Senate. That means the Democrats can pass health-care reform with a simple majority.
But there is an attendant cost to the majority party for using Reconciliation. The Byrd rule, passed in 1985, sets out the rules for what Reconciliation can and cannot be used for. In particular, it specifies that Senators will be allowed to raise a point of order against “extraneous” provisions in a Reconciliation bill which, among other things, “would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure.” Critically, cloture must be invoked to overcome a point of order. So the filibuster power is back.
Here’s the bottom line. Since the Budget Act states that the Reconciliation measure covers the next ten years, the Byrd Rule had the effect of allowing a point of order to be raised against any spending increase (or tax cut) that does not contain a ten-year sunset provision. That’s why the Bush tax cuts, passed via the Reconciliation route in 2001, 2003, and 2005, had sunset provisions written into them. If Democrats use Reconciliation, they will get a health-care bill, but it will expire.
Now let’s talk politics. There’s a debate within the debate that only seasoned politicos know about. Since the actual benefits of Reconciliation are mixed - a health-care bill can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate but it must have a sunset provision - the real power of Reconciliation is not in its actual usage, but in the mere threat of its usage.
The benefits of issuing the threat of going the Reconciliation route are akin to the threat of a presidential veto. The threat of a presidential veto sets the boundaries of permissible legislative action; it lets Congress know what is out-of-the-question and therefore powerfully guides legislative outcomes in the direction of the president’s preferences. By letting it be known that they will resort to Reconciliation if they had to, Democrats in Congress are incentivizing Republicans to be part of the making of a bi-partisan bill rather than be shut out of a purely partisan one. In making the threat, Democrats are specifying the costs of Republican non-compliance to the tune of: “if we let you stay in the kitchen, at least you can determine some of the ingredients in the cake. Make us shut you out and you won’t have even the slightest say.”
Like the presidential veto, the power of Reconciliation is maximal at the level of a threat. For between the time a threat is issued and the time when a bill is passed (via Reconciliation or not), there is a powerful incentive for Republican Senators to come back to the bargaining table because there is the distinct possibility that they could be shut out. Reconciliation is the Democratic antidote to the Republican Party becoming the “Party of ‘No’” For if Republicans keep saying “No,” then they box themselves into the plea of Nolo Contendere.
That is why different spokespersons for the Democratic Party are keeping the Republicans guessing and making sporadic and cryptic references to the Reconciliation possibility. And Republicans are trying to minimize the power of the threat by characterizing it as a no-go “nuclear option.” Unfortunately for Republicans, theirs is an empty threat because there is no Mutually Assured Destruction in this asymmetric power situation, and it is both a legal and political fact that, as the White House says, the Reconciliation option “is out there.” It is a win-win situation for Democrats to issue the threat, for if Republicans are unmoved by the threat, Democrats could materialize the threat and get what they wanted having known that an effort at bipartisanship had failed anyway.
What is missed in the debate out there now is that the effect of Reconciliation is already underway, for its power lies in its threat.
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