Late Wednesday night, Representative Ken Calvert of California, the chief GOP author of the appropriations bill, surprised Democrats by introducing an amendment, slated to be voted on Thursday, that appeared to undo the changes already added and restore the Confederate flag to national cemeteries. Democrats were aghast. According to Roll Call, Representative Betty McCollum was “audibly shaken” as she rose to protest the move in a speech on the House floor. The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, G.K. Butterfield, took to the floor to express his “utter outrage”:
Don’t Republicans understand that the Confederate Battle Flag is an insult to 40 million African Americans and to many other fair-minded Americans?
By Thursday morning, Republican leaders decided that instead of risking a public debate over the flag, they would pull the entire spending bill from the floor.
The Political Virtues of Hypocrisy
For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts: “Because parliamentary bodies have to arrive at binding decisions on the full range of human activity in an atmosphere lacking the structure provided by either money or hierarchy, members have to find ways to bring some order out of what could be chaos,” Frank writes. So trading votes is how the business of politics is conducted. “Once you have promised another member that you will do something—vote a certain way, sponsor a particular bill, or conduct a hearing—you are committed to do it.”
.. As Frank has it, legislators have to act in ideologically inconsistent ways in the short run if they want to advance their larger objectives in the long run, as those larger objectives can only be achieved with teamwork. And the other members of their legislative team are only going to play ball with them if they know that they’ll take one for the team, that they’ll vote for something they don’t like because the team needs it.
.. Frank’s view of hypocrisy is a self-serving narrative, to be sure, but it’s also a very rare example of a legislator choosing to actually explain such behavior, rather than pretending that such behavior does not exist.
.. “Legislators who accommodate voter sentiment are denounced as cowardly, and those who defy it are just as fiercely accused of rejecting democratic norms,” he writes. And while “both of these opposing views of a representative’s obligations are wholly defensible,” something “less” defensible to Frank is “the tendency of most voters to alternate between them, depending entirely on whether or not they agree with the official’s substantive position.”
.. “In a partisan political system, pleas of political self-interest outrank a claim to know better than one’s party colleagues what is best for the country.” Privileging partisanship over personal beliefs, Congress rewards those who look past the strength of the available evidence or the depth of their own convictions, choosing instead to vote to accrue credit or pay political debts.
.. Posner and Sunstein think we can close some of that gap with new approaches: introducing a veil of ignorance into certain decision-making by removing partisan markers from policy proposals
The Trump Balloon
(When challenged that a report he cited concerned immigrants who had been raped, he said, “Somebody’s doing the raping!”)
.. William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and an ideologist of the neoconservatives, is quick to say that he does not support Trump, but counsels the Republican Party to learn from his blunt political themes: pro-toughness, pro-winning, anti-Obamacare, etc. Kristol’s goal is to avoid the nomination of a mumbly centrist who refuses to attack head on the Obama legacy and, presumably, Hillary Clinton. If the Party fails to find an aggressively conservative candidate, he believes, Trump or someone like him might play the role of Ross Perot, siphoning away right-wing populist voters from the G.O.P.
.. Chris Christie distanced himself from Trump’s rant, too, but he was quick to add, “I like Donald. He’s a good guy.”
Obama’s Grace
Here is another reason to watch rather than just read about the presentation. It reinforces the fact that this was a major national ceremony, involving fundamental discussion of national issues and prospects, in which all the major participants were black: president, preachers, mourners, congregation. I can’t think of a comparable previous event. Someone writing about our time will, I think, note it as an important step that this was treated not as a “minority” commemoration but as a central American discussion.
.. I have my complaints about and disappointments with Obama. But I hate the conventional D.C.-media disdain for him as a guy too cool, too aloof, and too generally above-it-all to be interested in the grimy work of public affairs. Think of the columns that begin, “Barry is bored …” We can’t yet fully reckon the ways his era has changed our country, from the long aftermath of the 2008 recession to the consequential court decisions good and bad.