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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Should I be concerned that this spending bill is too long for anyone to realistically read it before voting on it? Even if that's the norm, it still sounds like a bad thing.

This is too short for a top level post. Please make longer more effortful top level posts in the future.

This is funny.

What's there to read? The federal budget is dominated by stuff that is pretty much untouchable.

  • Social Security, 21%, can't touch that, old people vote.

  • Medicare/Medicaid, 25%, good lucking touching that, because again, old people vote, and poor people are a cross-party voting block.

  • Defense, 13%, haha, by all means touch that live wire, why do you hate America and freedom?

  • Interest on the debt, 7%, sure can't touch that.

  • Benefits for government employees and veterans, 7%, have fun touching that, it's great PR to screw with veterans.

And then past that, it's really, really popular programs like SNAP until you get down to the 1% range, where the vaunted “waste, fraud, and abuse and funding Piss Christ” programs live, and messing with those bends the cost curve not even a teeny, tiny bit.

There's not only expenditures in the bill, though, there's also policy.

This wasn’t a budget. It’s an authorization to keep using the previous budget, plus or minus a few special interests.

It's certainly not a good thing but it's not as bad as it may seem at first glance. A lot of the content in the bill won't be new material to the people voting on it. Part of the reason the bill gets so long is because Congress takes a bunch of other bills introduced throughout the year and append them to the appropriations bill. So in addition to funding the government this bill also contains reform of the Electoral Count Act and a bunch of other stuff not related to funding the government.

It would be better if we could just vote on all these bills themselves but various things prevent that. Part of that is that there is little bipartisan agreement on individual bills which means, with the way the Senate works, only the rare bills with large support in both parties can pass. This is also why there's such a focus on the contours of reconciliation, since those bills can bypass the Senate hurdles. Another part is that there's little trust (for good reason) between the two parties (or even factions within the parties) that they will keep their word on deals for voting for different bills. There's always a concern with enforcement of a deal like "If we vote for and pass bill X, I'll vote for and help pass bill Y." After X is passed you can just not vote on Y, after all. This is also why the end of the year omnibus is so controversial. The funding bill carries a very large downside (government shutdown) in the event it doesn't pass, so both parties load it up with as much as they can before it becomes impassable. Since the whole thing passes as a single package, with a large negative for voting against, it's basically the only time the parties can make some kind of enforceable deal.

I have to wonder, are we the only country that uses the act of funding the government to try and get laws passed at the same time? Surely they don't do this in other countries--I wouldn't be surprised if they even have laws against it! Granted, I guess "shutting down the federal government" is met with a shrug of the shoulders in other countries compared to here (for example, I visited Spain at a time where there was apparently no government formed).

I am not aware of any others, but I'm also not aware of any other legislative body that has anything like the cloture rule in the US Senate (requiring a larger proportion of votes in the body to end debate on a bill and proceed to a vote to pass it than is required to actually pass it). If the Senate didn't have its particular cloture rule it would be unnecessary to tie so many bills making substantive policy changes to a spending bill, because they could just be passed through ordinary business instead.

It's like entries in a database. No one even thinks of it as money anymore.

Spending plans have been too long for anyone to read for a long time, it's kind of how they're designed.

I'm unfamiliar with the USA government, but in Canada, "spending bills" are all massive and they take weeks/months to put together. The vote is more of a rarely exercised opportunity to veto rather than actually propose changes. Although no one should technically see the full bill before it gets presented to congress, the management board of the government coordinate it with the central politicians for a long time before that.

I believe this is considerably more dysfunctional than that because the government shuts down on Friday if it doesn’t get through.

It’s probably not a good thing that the government is funded by a series of last minute deals.

Why do they wait so long to pass the budget?

From "Fiscal Cliff Notes" by Scott Alexander:

Every time there is a Big Deadline, the two sides are unable to make progress until Right Before The Big Deadline. And then every time, they push through the obvious compromise deal at the last second.

And every time, people complain about how immature and incompetent Congress is to spend months deadlocked over the issue and not be able to solve it until the night before, like a schoolchild throwing together a book report ten minutes before class. The Internet tells me:

The Fiscal Cliff deal that was struck last night is one that my Toyota salesman could have put together in 10 minutes. Yet, it took months and months and months of back and forth dancing and massaging and grandstanding and who knows what, to get what we got.

One thing I wish we could put in every school and courtroom on those stone tablets where they were going to stick the Ten Commandments before they had to cancel that for First Amendment reasons is some version of "WHEN YOU SEE PEOPLE WHO SHOW EVERY SIGN OF BEING SMART GUYS - LIKE GETTING ELECTED TO LEAD THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - APPEARING OBVIOUSLY SPECTACULARLY INCOMPETENT, AT LEAST CONSIDER THAT THEY'RE DOING SOMETHING THAT MAKES SENSE FROM WITHIN THEIR OWN INCENTIVE SYSTEM. ALSO, LEARN SOME GAME THEORY."

The particular game theory concept involved here is called "brinksmanship". Wikipedia says:

"Brinkmanship is the practice of pushing dangerous events to the verge of—or to the brink of—disaster in order to achieve the most advantageous outcome. It occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labour relations, and (in contemporary settings) military strategy involving the threatened use of nuclear weapons."

Suppose there is a pie to be divided up, plus some disastrous outcome if no agreement is reached. For example, you and I must split a pot of $10,000 between us, and unless we can both agree on the same split by midnight, we both die horribly. If we are both good people, we can agree to split it 50-50 and that's that.

Suppose I am greedy. I can say "Actually, I will only accept a 90-10 split in my favor. So either agree to that, or I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight." If you believe me, your choice is to settle for a smaller amount of money, or to die horribly. It would seem reasonable to agree to the smaller amount of money.

However, you might also be tempted to call my bluff. "Okay," you say. "I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight."

And maybe I say "Oh, no, just kidding, I'll accept 50-50." Or maybe I decide to call your bluff and say "Okay then, see you in Hell."

And if I do the latter, maybe you think "Oh, he wasn't bluffing after all, I'll just agree to the 90-10 split then." Or maybe you say "I bet that's another bluff. I'm just going to sit here until 11:59 and see if he starts sweating."

If both players are at least a little bit greedy, and there's no disincentive for waiting, the game ends with both players saying "Okay then, I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight," whistling in the most deliberately carefree-seeming manner possible until then, and simultaneously saying "No, wait, changed my mind, I'll accept 50-50!" at 11:59 and 59 seconds.

It’s not technically a budget. These are temporary spending measures that have to be renewed. Congress does this because prominent politicians would like to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram in pet programs at the last minute.

It's absolutely not a good thing.

In theory everyone has staff each reading a small portion and summarizing anything important for them. In practice they just hear from lobby groups and get peer pressured by other congressmen.

It's a product of the way legislative procedure works these days. Realistically, all legislative decisions are made during negotiations between leadership teams, whose staffs craft the final product. The actual voting is just nosecounting - backbenchers aren't expected to have much, if any input into the terms of the bill.

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Was it always like this is the US?

No. There have been previous systems, most recently the Seniority system. There, major negotiations over legislation occurred in specialized oversight committees, and was controlled by the senior representatives/senators of each party on each committee.

The two parties in the US are basically standing coalitions, and until very recently is was normal for junior coalition partners(say, the blue dog caucus{moderate democrats}) to jump over to the other coalition for individual bills, giving a lot more power to individual congressmen.

The senate still sort of works that way, the house is moving away from that.

Backbencher has always existed as a term in Congress - maybe it's used a little more because reporters know more about other political systems, but people who voted the way leadership told them too in decent numbers has existed since the first couple of Congresses.

Now, it is true that non-leadership has far less power than it did in past decades, but Congress has largely allowed that power to be taken away, through its own actions. That's only balooned in recent years as the freshman that get the most attention and do the best in fundraising, especially on the conservative side, openly talk about how they have no policy people on their staff, but only comms people. Which only makes it easier for leadership to have control.