TV stardom can make an acting career. The best actors on the most successful series—think James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine Benes—become not only popular characters but cultural icons, almost real to their audiences.
But even the most successful series come to an end, and their stars face the rest of their lives. On what they have earned—Gandolfini got $1 million an episode and Louis-Dreyfus $660,000 per episode—they don’t ever have to work again. But if they do, they face two choices: they can continue to play variations on the same character. Or strike out in new directions.
That’s what Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus try for in Enough Said, a recently-released and well-reviewed romantic comedy written and directed by Nicole Holofcener about two middle-aged divorcées, Albert and Eva, who find each other and love. Gandolfini succeeds; Louis-Dreyfus, not so much. And because she falls short, a picture with a great deal of potential is perfectly pleasant, but not as good as it might have been.
Senate Intelligence Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), in an effort to protect the National Security Agency from a major reduction of its surveillance capabilities, is arguing that the U.S. could have prevented the 9/11 terror attacks had we had modern NSA powers back in 2000.
Feinstein declared in a Senate Judiciary hearing on Wednesday that before 9/11 “our intelligence was inadequate and we couldn’t collect enough data.” She argues that “absent these kinds of technological programs, we do not have an opportunity to pick [the information] up.” Her implication was that such reductions would render the U.S. government incapable of preventing future attacks.
How far the government, (and by extension, the public) pushes to reform / reduce / restructure the NSA will crystallize in the coming weeks as the national debate cranks up. But one thing is clear. Dianne Feinstein, who served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when the Congressional Joint Inquiry into September 11 was created, knows that there was quite a bit of ignored intelligence prior to the 9/11 attacks.
As co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Amy Zegart outlines in her book, Spying Blind, the problem before 9/11 was not really about a dearth of useful intelligence. To the contrary, there actually was much of that. Failures were more rooted in an inability to react to intelligence signals. This failure was, as Zegart argues, because of institutional resistance from intelligence agencies themselves, “whose structures, habits, cultures and procedures had grown impervious to change after decades of fighting the Cold War.” We had the capability to investigate pertinent intelligence prior to 9/11, but we didn’t.
Unsurprisingly, there were human and computer glitches on the first day that Americans could sign up for insurance through Obamacare. Preparing for the launch of a large, complex federal government program takes time, and the implementation problems would certainly have been much, much worse if the law had gone into effect immediately upon being passed. But the Tea Party Republicans’ anti-Obamacare hostage-taking makes it more likely that a pell-mell rush to implement new legislation — however wastefully and sloppily — will become an enduring feature of American politics.
In prior eras, neither party would have tried to undo the signature legislation of the other party and its President just because they garnered more seats (though not in this case of 2012, more votes) in one house in the ensuing election. With no need to worry about retroactive repeal, complex legislation could therefore be implemented slowly and thoughtfully.
Tea Party Congressional Representatives have destroyed this governing norm by trying to undo Obamacare through a government shutdown and threatened debt default. As a result, whichever party is in power in the future will probably not risk any delay in implementing the laws they pass. If Obamacare had been implemented immediately upon passage, it would have been a mess in policy terms. But politically, it would now have millions of beneficiaries who would have vehemently resisted the current retroactive repeal effort.
Millions of federal employees without paychecks in the middle of a wobbly economic recovery is the most visible current damage of the Tea Party Republicans’ hostage taking. But even deeper damage may become evident over time if public policy implementation becomes a panicky, haphazard race to beat the closing of the next election’s polling booths.
OK, all through this thing, and all day Monday, I thought that a shutdown was relatively unlikely. Not impossible, but below 50/50.
Why? Because it was pretty obvious that only a small group of Congressional Republicans thought it was a good idea. To some extent because it really isn’t a good idea for them; to some extent because everyone has massively overlearned the lessons of 1995-1996 (Sean Trende is the latest to look at the minimal electoral effects).
Indeed, Byron York reports that the true believers are somewhere around 30 to 60 House Republicans — and, reporting last night, that “175 GOP lawmakers, are willing, and perhaps even eager, to vote” for a clean CR.
This kind of reporting pins the blame for the shutdown squarely on Speaker Boehner — who, as Brian Beutler puts it, “is a powerful person with agency and a conscience.” If in fact 175 House Republicans were actually eager to end this thing without a shutdown, and Boehner refused to bring it to the floor because he feared that the 30-60 would cost him his job, then the responsibility lies mainly with him (see also Greg Sargent’s similar numbers).
Despite the massive gerrymander that allowed the Republicans to keep a majority of House seats with a minority of the votes, the “clean” Continuing Resolution (that is, one that doesn’t undo Obamacare) passed by the Senate would pass the House if John Boehner allowed it to come up for a vote (which he might in fact do, at the eleventh hour, though doing so might cost him the Speakership). So the notion that the Republicans have any sort of democratic legitimacy behind their threat to shut down the government and damage the economy unless the rest of us pay them ransom doesn’t pass the giggle test.
Today’s prize for the unintentionally funniest comment goes to Pete Wehner:
Pete Wehner, a former senior aide to President George W. Bush, said a shutdown “would play to the worst stereotypes of the Republican Party as a party of anarchists, nihilists and extortionists—charges that are ludicrously unfair, but have the power to stick.”
OK. I’ll bite. I understand why those charges have the power to stick. But what makes them unfair? If the Republicans don’t want to be thought of as a party of extortionists, here’s a tip: Stop practicing extortion.
The best explanation of the U.S. government shutdown points to two factors. The first involves information, or what people think they know. The second involves incentives, or what motivates our elected representatives.
From decades of empirical research, we know that when like-minded people speak with one another, they tend to become more extreme, more confident and more unified — the phenomenon known as group polarization. One reason involves the spread of information within echo chambers.
If you are in a group whose members think the Affordable Care Act is horrible, you will hear many arguments to that effect and very few in the other direction. After a lot of people have spoken, Obamacare will seem much worse than merely horrible; it might well be taken as a menace to the republic. In recent months, the House of Representatives has been a case study in group polarization.
In a free nation, of course, no member of Congress can really spend life in an echo chamber. They are aware that people disagree with them. To appreciate what is happening with the shutdown, we have to understand a bit more about the nature of political beliefs. It turns out that when people’s convictions are deeply held but false, efforts to correct those views can backfire. Such efforts tend to entrench and fortify those very convictions.
We are now just hours from a possible government shutdown and just days from a possible debt crisis. James Fallows has a nice piece up explaining that these situations are not simply the result of “gridlock,” despite many journalists’ (understandable?) efforts to frame the story as a both-sides-do-it situation. Yes, gridlock is a problem when one party controls a chamber of Congress and another controls the White House, preventing them from working on collective goals, but inaction really isn’t the problem here.
Similarly, some have sought to portray the current double-crisis as a consequence of polarization. Well, polarization contributed to this, but that’s hardly everything that’s going on. Polarization simply means that the major parties have moved apart from each other ideologically. (It can also mean that they’ve grown more internally cohesive. Both have happened.) But polarization is more a necessary condition than a cause. The proximate cause of this crisis is norm violation by one party.
That is to say, one party has developed tools — and an apparent willingness to use them — that the other party has not. House Republicans, notably, have developed a list of policy demands (including, prominently, the delay or repeal of existing law), and have refused to pass a continuing budget resolution that doesn’t meet those demands. This is, needless to say, not the typical means by which policy goals are met in the American political system. But unless their demands are met, they say, there will be no bill to fund the federal government tomorrow. Republicans have demonstrated their willingness to use this rather blunt tool in the past, as manifested in a multi-week shutdown during the winter of 1995-96. (Please see my recent posts at Pacific Standard — here and here — for some discussion of the consequences of that shutdown.)
A government shutdown would be damaging — for government employees, for those who depend on its services, and ultimately for the economy — but would likely be just a minor cold compared to what the refusal to raise the debt ceiling would be. Yet House Republicans are apparently prepared to do just that if their policy demands are not met. We’ve not yet crossed that rubicon, although we came close a few years ago.
In 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman, who had represented Connecticut’s Democrats in the Senate since 1989, lost his re-nomination bid. Activists in his party had grown tired of his alliances with the Bush administration, especially on issues related to the Iraq War, and they decided they no longer wanted him as their standard-bearer. Famously, Lieberman ran in the general election under a new party label (“Connecticut for Lieberman”) and retained his Senate seat. This feat is currently only possible in three states: Iowa, New York, and, of course, Connecticut.
As Michael Kang points out in his article “Sore Loser Laws and Democratic Contestation” in the Georgetown Law Review, 47 states have some sort of “sore loser” law in place. In such states, those who lose a primary may not participate in the general election that year.
A group of political scientists and legal scholars (including Kang and me) spent some time discussing these laws at a panel on Thursday entitled “Do Partisan Primaries Serve the Public Interest?”, hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center at Ohio State University. As Kang explained, these types of laws are quite clearly and unapologetically pro-party. In an era when so many laws are design to constrain parties and limit their influence in elections, sore loser laws stand out as efforts to help prop up the party system. And whereas things like high ballot signature thresholds can make it difficult for minor parties or unaffiliated candidates to access the ballot, sore loser laws are an outright ban on candidates the parties don’t like. And they really hurt the best of those candidates. As Kang argues in his article:
Attorney General Eric Holder’s new policy on the application of mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases reserves tough sentences for offenders who work within larger organizations rather than being independent operators. Under this policy, a banker who will launder drug money for any outside drug organization may get more leniency than would a courier or lookout who is a member of single criminal organization. In a balanced appraisal of Holder’s proposal, Jonathan Caulkins points out a potential adverse impact of prioritizing offenders on this criterion:
Organizations of all ethnicities import drugs, but given the geography of production and transshipment, smuggling operations are disproportionately Hispanic. Likewise, members of all racial and ethnic groups participate in retail selling, but - with the exception of outlaw motorcycle groups - the gang members are disproportionately minorities.
The result of assuming that those criminals who work within a larger organization deserve more severe punishment may therefore be that the federal prison population over-represents Hispanics and African-Americans to an even greater extent than it does today.
An alternative approach to sentencing is to worry less about whether drug offenders are part of an organization and instead focus the toughest punishment on those individuals whose removal would most severely disrupt the overall illegal drug trade. This would be a significant departure from the longstanding law enforcement practice of sweeping up huge numbers of low-level drug offenders, most of whom are people of color who work within a gang or other large criminal organization. To quote from an I co-authored a few years back:
Iranian President Hassan Rohani — who this week is attempting to charm the pants off the United Nations, President Barack Obama, world Jewry and Charlie Rose — may succeed in convincing many people that the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t actually want to gain control of a nuclear arsenal.
Why Rohani would assert this is obvious: The sanctions that the U.S. is imposing on Iran are doing real economic damage. A crippled economy threatens the interests of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and thus the regime’s stability. We know that the regime isn’t popular among many segments of the Iranian population — witness the brutal crackdown on large-scale protests in 2009 — and that it must make at least some of its citizens happy if it is to survive in the long term.
Rohani hopes to convince the world that Iran’s nuclear intentions are peaceful and that his country is a rational, thoughtful player on the global stage and, therefore, please give us access once again to the international banking system.
Here are some reasons to doubt the sincerity of Iran’s protestations.
1. Rohani, so far at least, hasn’t indicated that Iran is open to reversing course on its nuclear program. He has actually said that the regime will not even talk about suspending uranium enrichment.
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