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Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership

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Last week, I noted that German chancellor Angela Merkel succeeded in achieving the post-partisanship in Germany that US president Barack Obama had hoped to achieve when he ran for president in 2008.USflag

While that’s somewhat of an unfair comparison given the collegiality and consensus that’s developed in Germany’s postwar politics, there’s perhaps a lesson for US politicians to learn from the example of German politics in resolving the current standoff that has shut down the federal government of the United States and threatens to precipitate a sovereign debt crisis later this month over the US debt ceiling.

Even after Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats won a once-in-a-generation landslide victory, she remains five seats of an absolute majority in Germany’s Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament) and well short of a majority in the Bundesrat (the upper house), so she’s locked in negotiations — likely for the rest of the year — to form a viable governing coalition with either her rival center-left Social Democrats or the slightly more leftist Green Party.

Contrast that to the United States, where a minority of a party that controls one-half of one branch of the American government has now succeeding in effecting a shutdown of the US government.

In the US House of Representatives today, speaker John Boehner (generally) operates on the ‘Hastert rule.’  He’ll only bring bills to the floor of the House that are supported by a ‘majority of the majority’ — a majority of the 232-member Republican caucus.  So even if 115 Republicans and all 200 Democrats in the House support a bill, such as a clean ‘continuing resolution’ to end the current shutdown, they won’t be able to do so if 117 Republicans prefer to condition a continuing resolution upon a one-year delay of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ‘Obamacare.’

It’s not uncommon in parliamentary systems for the ‘loyal opposition’ to sometimes lend their support for an important piece of legislation.  Earlier this year in the United Kingdom, British prime minister David Cameron passed a marriage equality law only with the support of the opposition Labour Party in the House of Commons in light of antipathy within a certain segment of the center-right Conservative Party to same-sex marriage.

In country after country in Europe, including Greece, Ireland and Latvia, traditional rivals on the left and right have sucked up the political costs of austerity and voted to accept difficult reforms, tax increases and tough budget cuts in the face of rising unemployment and depression-level economies in order to avoid the further tumult of being pushed out of the eurozone’s single currency.  If Italy’s left and right could support former prime minister Mario Monti’s technocratic government for 15 months, it’s not outside the realm of democratic tradition to believe that Boehner could form a working coalition in the US House to resolve a crisis that threatens not only American political credibility in the world and the American economy, but the entire global economy.

But as Alex Pareene at Salon wrote earlier today, the United States doesn’t have a parliamentary system, it has a presidential system where an opposition party that controls one house of Congress can cause a crisis if it wants to do so:

An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn’t immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority, and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage. The reason we’re in permanent crisis mode isn’t “extremism,” but a system of government that guarantees political brinkmanship.

There’s a bit of ‘grass is always greener’ mentality to that counterfactual.  Parliamentary systems come with their own set of difficulties, and governments in parliamentary systems can wind up just as paralyzed as the current American government seems to be — former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is causing a political crisis this very week in Italy that will culminate in a vote of no confidence on Wednesday against the fragile coalition headed by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta.  Though the government’s been in power for just five months, Italy could face its second set of elections in 12 months if Letta’s government falls.  Belgium famously went without a government for 535 days between 2009 and 2011 because no majority coalition could form a government.  Moreover, minority governments in parliamentary systems often lurch from crisis to crisis, with individual lawmakers willing and able to ‘hold up’ the government’s legislation.

But the United States need not change its entire system of government to take away a few lessons from Merkel and from Germany.

Juliet Eilperin and Zachary A. Goldfarb at The Washington Post suggested earlier Tuesday that Boehner make a push to become the first truly bipartisan speaker:

[T]he press tends to trumpet two unflattering themes: that Boehner can neither manage his own conference nor make a credible deal with the White House. As a result, the narrative runs, Americans are left careening from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis, and Congress can’t even tackle popular initiatives such as immigration reform. A host of other potential changes supported by huge swaths of both parties — from tax and entitlement reform to infrastructure spending — are also left on the table just because of the fallout Boehner faces from a few dozen, ultra-conservative Republicans.

At least that’s the rap against Boehner, whose speakership so far has been defined by blocking Obama’s priorities rather than producing significant laws. But that could all change if he were just to decide to say to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): “Let’s enter a grand coalition. Democrats will vote for me for speaker as long as Republicans hold a majority. And we’ll do a budget deal that raises a little bit of tax revenue and reforms entitlements. We’ll overhaul the tax code for individuals and businesses. We’ll pass immigration reform and support the infrastructure spending that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor unions want.”

Call it a pink-blue coalition — the moderate Republicans and the Democrats.  (Or maybe the donkey-rhino‡ coalition). Continue reading Toward a pink-blue coalition: how House Democrats can rescue Boehner’s speakership

How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world

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The People’s Republic of China doesn’t do government shutdowns. USflag

Neither does India, the world’s largest democracy.  Neither does Russia nor Japan nor the European Union.

The crisis that the United States faces over the next month — the nearly certain federal government shutdown set to begin on Tuesday and the US government’s potential sovereign default if the US Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling — is almost completely foreign to the rest of the world.

The vocabulary of the government budget crises that have sprung from divided government during the presidential administration of Barack Obama — from ‘sequester’ to ‘fiscal cliff’ to ‘supercommittee’ — is not only new to American politics, it’s a vocabulary that exists solely to describe phenomena exclusive to American politics.  As the Republican Party seems ready to force a budgetary crisis over the landmark health care reform law that was passed by Congress in 2010 and arguably endorsed by the American electorate when they reelected Obama last November over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the rest of world has been left scrambling to understand the crisis, mostly because the concept of a government shutdown (or a debt ceiling — more on that below) is such an alien affair.

If, for example, British prime minister David Cameron loses a vote on the United Kingdom’s budget, it’s considered the defeat of a ‘supply bill’ (i.e., one that involves government spending), and a loss of supply would precipitate his government’s resignation.  If Italian prime minister Enrico Letta loses a vote of no confidence in the Italian parliament later this week, his government would also most likely resign.  In some cases, if cooler heads prevail, their governments might form anew (such as the Portuguese government’s reformation earlier this summer following its own crisis over budget austerity).  Otherwise, the country would hold new elections, as will happen later this month in Luxembourg after the government of longtime prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker fell over a secret service scandal.

So to the extent that a government falls, in most parliamentary systems, the voters then elect a government, or a group of parties that then must form a government, and that government must pass a budget and, well, govern.  Often, in European and other parliamentary systems, the typically ceremonial head of state plays a real role in pushing parties together to stable government.  Think of the role that Italian president Giorgio Napolitano played in bringing together both Letta’s government and the prior technocratic government headed by Mario Monti.  Or perhaps the role that the Dutch monarch played in appointing an informateur and a formateur in the Dutch cabinet formation process until the Dutch parliament stripped the monarchy of that role a few years ago.

But wait! Belgium went 535 days without a government a few years ago, you say!

That’s right — but even in the middle of that standoff, when leaders of the relatively more leftist, poorer Walloon north and the relatively conservative, richer Flemish south couldn’t pull together a governing coalition, Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme stayed on as prime minister to lead a caretaker government.  The Leterme government had ministers and policies and budgets, though Leterme ultimately pushed through budgets that reduced Belgium’s budget deficit.  No government workers were furloughed, as will happen starting Tuesday if congressional members don’t pass a continuing resolution to fund the US government.

To the north of the United States, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper caused a bit of a constitutional brouhaha when he prorogued the Canadian parliament in both 2008 and 2009 on the basis of potentially political considerations.  In Canadian parliamentary procedure, prorogation is something between a temporary recess and the dissolution of parliament — it’s the end of a parliamentary session, and the prime minister can prorogue parliament with the consent of Canada’s governor-general.  Harper raised eyebrows among constitutional scholars when he hastily prorogued the parliament in December 2008 after the center-left Liberal Party and the progressive New Democratic Party formed a coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois in what turned out to be a failed attempt to enact a vote of no confidence against Harper’s then-minority government.

The governor-general at the time, Michaëlle Jean, took two hours to grant the prorogation — in part to send a message that the governor-general need not rubber-stamp any prime ministerial requests for proroguing parliament in the future.

Harper again advised to prorogue the parliament from the end of December 2009 through February 2010, ostensibly to keep parliament in recess through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, though critics argued he did so to avoid investigation into his government’s knowledge of abusive treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.  Again, however, proroguing parliament didn’t shutter Canadian government offices like the US government shutdown threatens to do.

Moreover, in parliamentary systems, it’s not uncommon for a government to survive a difficult vote with the support of the loyal opposition.  But in the United States, House speaker John Boehner has typically (though not always) applied the ‘majority of the majority’ rule — or the ‘Hastert’ rule, named after the Bush-era House speaker Denny Hastert.  In essence, the rule provides that Boehner will bring for a vote only legislation that’s supported by a majority of the 233 Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, the lower congressional house (Democrats hold just 200 seats).  So while there may be a majority within the House willing to avoid a shutdown, it can’t materialize without the support of a majority of the Republican caucus.  That means that 117 Republicans may be able to hold the House hostage, even if 116 Republicans and all 200 Democrats want to avoid a shutdown.

Realistically, that means that anything that Boehner can pass in the House is dead on arrival in the US Senate, the upper congressional house, where Democrats hold a 54-46 advantage.

There’s simply no real analog in the world of comparative politics.  Even the concept of a debt ceiling is a bit head-scratching to foreign observers — US treasury officials say that the government will face difficulties borrowing enough money to achieve the government’s obligations if it fails to lift the debt ceiling of $16.7 trillion on or before October 17.

Denmark stands virtually alone alongside the United States in having a statutory debt ceiling that requires parliamentary assent to raise the total cumulative amount of borrowing, but it hasn’t played a significant role in Danish budget politics since its enactment in 1993:

The Danish fixed nominal debt limit—legislatively outside the annual budget process—was created solely in response to an administrative reorganization among the institutions of government in Denmark and the requirements of the Danish Constitution. It was never intended to play any role in day-to-day politics.

So far, at least, raising Denmark’s debt ceiling has always been a parliamentary formality, and it was lifted from 950 billion Danish kroner to 2 trillion Danish kroner in 2010 with support from all of Denmark’s major political parties.

Contrast that to the United States, where a fight over raising the debt ceiling in summer 2011 caused a major political crisis and major economic turmoil, leading Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+.’  The Budget Control Act, passed in early August 2011, provided that the United States would raise its debt ceiling, but institute a congressional ‘supercommittee’ to search out budget cuts.  When the supercommittee failed to identify budget savings before January 2013, it triggered $1.2 trillion in ‘sequestration’ — harsh across-the-board budget cuts to both Democratic and Republican priorities that took effect earlier this year, though they were originally designed to be so severe so that they would serve as an incentive for more targeted budget adjustments.

Despite the fact of the dual crises facing the US government in October, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note has actually declined in recent weeks, indicating that while US political turmoil may spook global investors, they still (ironically) invest in Treasury notes as a safe haven:

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Continue reading How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world