Miles's Law: "A Bill The President Can Sign"

House GOP leaders oppose an effort to bring immigration reform to the House floor via a discharge petition.  The issue illustrates Miles's Law: where you stand depends on where you sit.  Partisan advantage determines where congressional leaders will stand on procedural issues.

Speaker Ryan said: “I want to have actual law and that means the White House has to be a part of this and it’s got to be a bill the president can sign ...What I don’t want to do is have a process that just ends up with a veto."

A few years ago, Ryan approved of sending the president bills that he would veto. On September 14, 2014, Scott Wong reported at The Hill:

Republicans plan to test President Obama’s willingness to use the veto pen if they capture control of the Senate in November, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said in an interview with The Hill.

The Budget Committee chairman and 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee said Obama hasn't had to make tough decisions on vetoing legislation because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has shelved most of the bills sent over by the GOP-led House.

“Right now, Harry Reid is protecting the president from making difficult decisions,” Ryan said Thursday, “and I believe that we can unblock a number of things that should at least get to the president’s desk and make him make a decision.”

Ryan followed this plan by sending President Obama a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, knowing that he would veto it. 

"Better Way"

House Speaker Paul Ryan is announcing an agenda for the House GOP.  Its title, "A Better Way," may seem vaguely familiar.  "The Better Way" was the campaign slogan of fictional California Senate candidate Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in the 1972 movie The Candidate.

"I Was Wrong"

In a speech to House interns today, Speaker Paul Ryan spoke about the state of American politics and deliberative democracy.  He uttered three words that one seldom hears from a major political figure: "I was wrong."

There was a time when I would talk about a difference between “makers” and “takers” in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. “Takers” wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don't want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point.

So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way. But I didn’t come out and say all this to be politically correct. I was just wrong. And of course, there are still going to be times when I say things I wish I hadn’t. There are still going to be times when I follow the wrong impulse.

...
That’s the thing about politics. We think of it in terms of this vote or that election. But it can be so much more than that. Politics can be a battle of ideas, not insults. It can be about solutions. It can be about making a difference. It can be about always striving to do better. That’s what it can be and what it should be. This is the system our Founders envisioned. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It’s infuriating at times. And it’s a beautiful thing too. Thank you all for being here today.

"Hope Yes? Then Vote Yes!"

The House GOP Whip writes to his members:

From: "Scalise, Steve

Date: Sunday, November 29, 2015 at 6:46 PM

Subject: The Path Forward

Dear Whip Team Colleagues:

“Neither the members nor the people are satisfied with how things are going. We need to

make some changes, starting with how the House does business… At this point, nothing

could be more inspiring than a job well done. Nothing could stir the heart more than

real, concrete results.” —Speaker Ryan, October, 29, 2015

We have turned the page and begun a new chapter of our majority. Speaker Ryan has laid

out a bold vision and emphasized the need for inclusion and regular order. I want to lay

out what I believe is the Whip team’s role in implementing Speaker Ryan's vision and our

responsibilities to contribute text to this exciting chapter.

I believe Speaker Ryan is asking for more from each of us. He is asking us as individual

Members to roll up our sleeves and become better legislative entrepreneurs. And he is

asking us to work better and harder as team members—at the Committees, the specific

caucuses, our state delegations, and the Conference as a whole.

And now I am asking the Whip team to adapt to this new, more inclusive environment. I

want the Whip team to be integral in:

· Making regular order a sustainable operating model

· Generating ideas and solutions from the bottom up

· Bolstering the work of Committees throughout the legislative process

· Communicating our House GOP vision

House Republicans are the most powerful force for limited government, strong national

defense and economic opportunity that exists in America today. But it is not enough to

just talk about conservative values. We need to pass conservative policy. And we can

only advance our values when we are united. Without 218 votes we have limited

influence. And it is the primary responsibility of the Whip team to build 218 votes to

advance those policies.

The Whip team is the strongest and most diverse organization in our Conference that

reaches into every committee, region and issue of the GOP Conference as whole. As we

open the process and allow more amendments and more committee-produced bills to

come to the floor, the pace will increase—and along with it so will the workload of the

Whip team.

The Whip operation will be critical to the success of this new era of our majority. We will

continue to develop mechanisms, products and platforms that assist in educating on the

policy, purpose and process of legislation moving to the House floor. I ask that each of

you share with me your ideas on how best to make this happen.

Hope Yes? Then Vote Yes!

I am optimistic that with greater inclusiveness and a more open Floor process, the House

can produce legislation that generates broader support from our Conference when we get

to final passage.

But, let’s be honest. Not every bill we are asked to vote on will be perfect and there will

be times when the choices we face are less than ideal. We are Members of Congress—

that’s part of the job. Too many in our Conference are falling into the pattern of voting

no on tough bills while actually hoping the bill passes because they know that the

outcome will be even worse if the bill fails.

To be clear, any Member who disagrees with the substance of a bill and genuinely

believes failure of the bill to pass is a better outcome not only has the freedom, but the

responsibility to their constituents to vote no. That is not the type of vote that has raised

frustration and concern within our Conference. The vote that hurts our Conference is the

no vote from a Member who hopes the bill passes, but relies on others to carry that load.

That vote isn’t fair to the Members who shoulder the responsibility of voting yes, and it

isn’t fair to the Republican Conference as a whole.

While we always strive to reach 218 with Republican votes, sometimes that is not

possible with divided government, and the story of a bill that passed with 150 Republican

votes is much more positive and assertive than the story of a bill that passes with 79

Republican votes. My point is simple: if there are 150 Republicans who hope the bill

passes, then there should be 150 Republicans who vote yes on final passage. As a

Member of the Whip team, I hope and expect you will do your part to help us build

consensus and help Members lean in to communicate back home why the tough vote was

the right vote.

Good of the Order

I am really proud of the work the Whip team has done these past 16 months. In short,

we’ve delivered in a big way for our Conference. It is a great record and base to build

upon over the coming months.

President Obama, the mainstream media, Minority Leader Pelosi, Senate Democrats,

outside groups—they have all taken their best shots at House Republicans. We have

responded with a more united, focused, and bold Conference under the direction of one

our country's most dynamic young leaders to come along in a long time. I hope you are as

excited as I am to get back on offense and advance our bold conservative vision for all

the country to see and embrace!

###

-Steve

Ryan, Rubio, and the Republicans

From The Economist:

FOR months the Republican Party has seemed more like a casting agency for pantomime characters than a serious political force. Its presidential primary race has been dominated by two men who have never held elected office. One is a bragadocious bully whose most celebrated idea is the construction of a “a beautiful wall” along the country’s southern border; the other is a Bible-thumping neurosurgeon who believes America is living in a “Gestapo” age and has a “psychopath” for a president. In the House of Representatives a small group of arch-conservatives, for whom compromise is apostasy, defenestrated their Speaker for refusing to shut down the government in order to stop public funding for Planned Parenthood, a health-care organisation that also provides abortions.

Yet in the past couple of weeks something has changed. Serious people are on the rise. Paul Ryan, the newly installed Speaker, is both widely admired among conservatives and known for his policy expertise. Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, is climbing up the presidential primary polls, leading the field on prediction markets and picking up endorsements from other politicians and backing from donors apace. Plenty could still go wrong, but one year from election day, many Republican grandees have a new spring in their step. They reckon that a non-crazy candidate could become their party’s nominee. And with a plausible presidential candidate and strong leadership in Congress, a clean sweep in 2016—winning the White House and retaining control of both Houses of Congress—might be possible after all.

Waning WASP Male Power

Catholic Paul Ryan is likely to succeed Catholic John Boehner as speaker of the House.. Accordingly, what Alan Greenblatt wrote at NPR three years ago is still true:

There are plenty of white men with power in this country, but it's become harder to find a WASP holding onto one of the top rungs of the political ladder.

The State Department was once dominated by old-stock aristocrats but hasn't been led by a white man since 1997. Among the four top congressional leaders, only one is a WASP — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who happens to be married to an Asian-American.

The Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, does not boast of a single justice who is Protestant. Instead, there are three Jews and six Catholics — one of them Hispanic, one of them black. And since the 2009 confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, the court also includes three women justices for the first time ever.

"Not a single group can hold onto power in any particular institution going forward," says Guy-Uriel Charles, founding director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics. "This reflects the fact that we are much more of an open society than we were previously, but we are also a society that by the numbers is increasingly diverse."

McConnell has since become majority leader, with Harry Reid (a Mormon) becoming minority leader.

Austerity Is Not Enough

At The Daily Beast, Lloyd Green cautions Paul Ryan and other Republicans not to adopt an austerity agenda:

Like it or not, the Republicans need to look beyond the apex of the economic pyramid, and offer something tangible to woo working Americans. So, for the GOP, it’s time to start focusing on 2016 and regaining the White House. And it’s not as though there isn’t enough material out there for the Republicans to work with.

For starters, job growth has been decoupled from workforce participation. While the number of Americans working in the private sector has returned to its pre-Great Recession level, the labor force participation rate has fallen to just over 63 percent, back where it stood when Jimmy Carter was president. Meanwhile,Floyd Norris of the New York Times reports that “total compensation of employees slipped to a 65-year low” on Obama’s watch.

So if Ryan weren’t suffering from a green eye-shade syndrome, he might also want to focus on Alzheimer’s. These days, Alzheimer’s is shaping up to be a major epidemic, and is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Alzheimer’s not only threatens lives, but it also endangers growth, and even budgets.

Against this backdrop, Jim Pinkerton, a former White House domestic policy aide to Presidents Reagan and Bush 41, calls for a “Cure Strategy.” That is, do to Alzheimer’s what we did to polio—make it go away.

Yes, a science-based qualitative approach to healthcare policy (cure the disease) makes a lot more sense than the rote quantitative approach (assume no change in the science and simply cut the costs). But unfortunately, Ryan is a number-cruncher to his core. Looking ahead, in 2015 he will rise to the Chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Evangelicals for a Non-Protestant Ticket

Mitt Romney is a Mormon and Paul Ryan is a Catholic.  The Republican ticket is the first in the history of either party not to include a Protestant. The Los Angeles Times reports that evangelicals are still backing it:

"It's our belief that the great irony of this election will be [that] you'll have the first ticket without a Protestant on it, and that ticket will get the highest support by evangelical voters of any ticket in history," said Gary Marx, executive director of the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition. "That's going to be the great irony — supporting a Mormon-Catholic ticket at record levels, and I think that's already showing up in the polling data."

...
The Faith and Freedom Coalition has set an ambitious goal of reaching out to 17.1 million evangelical households in 12 battleground states to push them to vote. Marx said the group was trying to contact each household seven to 12 times using a variety of techniques, including phone calls, direct mail, email, text messaging, voter guides in churches, radio ads on conservative-skewing stations and personal visits by volunteers.

Focus on the Family's political wing, CitizenLink, in cooperation with six other organizations, has set a goal of registering as many as 5 million previously unregistered evangelical voters, and is sending out millions of voter guides that compare Romney's and Obama's positions on issues of importance to conservative Christians.

"We want to make the records known," Daly said, "and let you decide which person lines up with your values."

Not all evangelicals are conservative, and the Obama campaign also has an outreach effort to rally religious voters. But polls suggest that the president will not do as well among white evangelicals as he did in 2008.

The slow economic recovery may be the primary reason. But Obama has also lost support among some evangelicals for his support of same-sex marriage, and for policies perceived to be threatening to religious freedom, including a rule in his healthcare plan that would require some religious institutions to provide contraceptive services to their employees.

Declining WASP Power

For the first time in history, no member of a major-party ticket is a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). President Obama is African American and his opponent is Mormon.  Their running mates are Catholic.  At NPR, Alan Greenblatt writes:

There are plenty of white men with power in this country, but it's become harder to find a WASP holding onto one of the top rungs of the political ladder.

The State Department was once dominated by old-stock aristocrats but hasn't been led by a white man since 1997. Among the four top congressional leaders, only one is a WASP — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who happens to be married to an Asian-American.

The Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, does not boast of a single justice who is Protestant. Instead, there are three Jews and six Catholics — one of them Hispanic, one of them black. And since the 2009 confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, the court also includes three women justices for the first time ever.

"Not a single group can hold onto power in any particular institution going forward," says Guy-Uriel Charles, founding director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics. "This reflects the fact that we are much more of an open society than we were previously, but we are also a society that by the numbers is increasingly diverse."

The Digital Campaign

Previous posts have examined the role of technology in the presidential race. The Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism reports:

On the eve of the conventions, Barack Obama holds a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters. The Obama campaign is posting almost four times as much content and is active on nearly twice as many platforms, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The report, which analyzed the content and volume of candidate communications on their websites and social media channels from June 4-17, 2012, finds that the digital gap between the campaigns was the greatest on Twitter. The Romney campaign averaged 1 tweet per day while the Obama campaign averaged 29 tweets, 17 per day on @BarackObama (the Twitter account associated with his presidency) and 12 on @Obama2012 (the account associated with his campaign). Obama also had about twice as many blog posts on his campaign website than did Romney and more than twice as many YouTube videos.

The study also found that while both campaigns' digital content primarily focused on their own candidate, roughly a third of the posts from the Romney campaign were about Obama-largely attacking him for a policy stance or action. About half as many of the Obama campaign's posts, 14%, focused on his challenger during the period studied.

"As the conventions drew closer, Romney's campaign took steps to close the technology gap, and may well take more with the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket," said PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell. "But there is a long way to go before the Romney team matches the level of activity of the Obama campaign."

The report notes a gap:

Neither campaign made much use of the social aspect of social media. Rarely did either candidate reply to, comment on, or "retweet" something from a citizen-or anyone else outside the campaign. On Twitter, 3% of the 404 Obama campaign tweets studied during the June period were retweets of citizen posts. Romney's campaign produced just a single retweet during these two weeks-repeating something from his son Josh.

Social Media and the Ryan Choice

NBC reported the Ryan selection Friday night.   Then social media led the way. Laura Petrecca writes at USA Today:

"Mitt's VP app" updated around 7 a.m. ET with word that Ryan had been selected. At 7:43 a.m., Romney tweeted that Ryan was his choice. Less than an hour later, Ryan sent out his first tweet from a new "PaulRyanVP" Twitter profile saying that he was "honored" to join Romney's team. A fresh Facebook page, under the "Paul Ryan VP" moniker, also appeared early Saturday.

A little after 9 a.m., the duo shared their news via a televised event in Norfolk, Va.

Mashable reports:

Ryan’s been a Twitter user since early 2009, when he first tweeted the following under the handle@RepPaulRyan: “Entering the brave new world of Twitter. What the heck is this anyway?”

...

On Saturday, a new Twitter account for Ryan began sending messages — @PaulRyanVP. The account was apparently created on Aug. 2 and quickly verified by Twitter.

...

Ryan’s former Facebook page is clearly intended to bolster his image as a deficit hawk: a graph based on his “Path to Prosperity” plan serves as his cover photo, showing the claimed debt reduction the United States would see under the plan.

... 

His new Facebook page, rolled out Saturday morning, features Romney/Ryan campaign branding and a cover photo showing the two candidates:

History and the Ryan Choice

Mitt Romney has chosen Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)  as his running mate.  This choice is historically significant in at least three respects.

1.  Romney is Mormon and Ryan is Catholic, so Romney-Ryan will be the first ticket in history without a Protestant.  Indeed, despite the longtime dominance of WASPs in American society, no white Protestant heads any of the branches of American government.  President Obama is African American.  Vice President Biden and Speaker John Boehner are Catholic.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is Mormon.  No Protestant currently sits on the Supreme Court.  And if one counts the Federal Reserve as a "fourth branch" of sorts, the same holds true:  Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is Jewish.

2.  For the first time since 1932, neither ticket will include a military veteran -- another sign of the growing gap between the military and the rest of society. (Only 21 percent of members of Congress are veterans.)

3.  Ryan was born on January 29, 1970, so he is the first nominee of either party born after the 1960s.  If we define the "baby boom" as consisting of those born between 1946 and 1964 (definitions vary), then he is the first post-boomer nominee.  (Sarah Palin, born 1964, just barely qualifies as a boomer.)