I'm a policy wonk, but I care very little about politics, who is up and who is down. The house speaker voting coverage has been largely the latter, with no more than the usual tropes about "normal Republicans" vs. "Radicals" suffused with Trump-loving election-denying fervor.
The WSJ's Kim Strassel, whose fact-filled columns are always a delight, explains that there actually are important issues at stake here:
Committees barely function. Members have no ability to debate or amend. Leaders disappear into back rooms to cook up mammoth bills that are dropped on the floor for last-minute take-it-or-leave it votes. Add Mrs. Pelosi’s Covid “proxy” voting rules, and most of the House didn’t even bother to clock in.
Under the proposed new rules package, committees are back in charge of legislation, with rules designed to ensure that bills address single subjects—rather than catch-all legislation. It similarly gives members new power to challenge amendments that aren’t related to the topic at hand. And it revives “Calendar Wednesday,” whereby any committee chairman can bring a bill straight to the floor.
It includes new provisions for accountability and transparency. Proxy voting is history, as are virtual committee meetings. It requires a 72-hour rule to give members time to read legislation. It ends Democrats’ wild experiment with staffer unionization, which threatened to tie the chamber up with crazy demands.
And it makes it much harder for the House to tax and spend. It imposes a “cut go” rule—requiring any mandatory spending increases be offset with equal or greater mandatory spending cuts. A three-fifths supermajority vote will be required for tax increases. It revives what’s known as the “Holman rule,” allowing appropriations bills effectively to defund the salaries of specific executive-branch officials or specific programs. It also requires each committee to submit an oversight plan that lays out what action it intends to take on unauthorized or duplicative programs.
These changes will produce the first functioning House in years, even as they tie the hands of spenders.
This all sounds pretty good to me. Strassel goes on
Take the win! Instead, the rebels continue to hold out for provisions that have the potential to negate this victory by plunging the House back into chaos. At the top of the list is the continued demand to allow any Republican member to call for a motion to “vacate the chair”—essentially a snap vote to oust the speaker.
Eliza Collins also reports intriguingly:
The night before the first speaker vote, Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Matt Gaetz of Florida went to Mr. McCarthy with a list of requests, which they said could get him to 218 votes if he committed to all.
That package included demands that Mr. McCarthy promise to hold a vote on a proposal to secure the border put forward by Texas Republicans, a vote to place congressional term limits, and a tax bill that would replace income, payroll and other taxes with a consumption tax. The group also asked for any "earmark," or funding projects specific to a members' district that get tacked onto legislation, to be approved with a two-thirds vote and that anytime an amendment to cut spending is proposed it be brought to the floor.
"a tax bill that would replace income, payroll and other taxes with a consumption tax" is just the sort of thing that MSM portray as lunatic radical rightwingism. And is music to my ears. Real legislators in real Washington DC are really thinking about trashing our insane income tax and replacing it with something simple and much less distortionary. Just a whiff of Trump's tax returns ought to convince you just how rotten our system is.
(I've written about this many times before. Before you go nuts about inequality, a consumption tax can be as progressive as you like, and can fund all the transfers you like. We should split the tax code into a revenue raising code based on a consumption tax, a subsidy code with on-budget expenditures in place of hidden tax deductions, and a transfer code with on-budget checks written to whomever our democracy deems worthy.)
I'm not in favor of term limits and probably not a fan of the Texas Republican's approach to immigration. But 9/10 is pretty good. And the point, serious political reform and policy discussion is going on here.
There is a lot of handwringing about "dysfunction" but I'm not so sure. Parliamentary democracies -- Israel, most recently! -- go through long periods of negotiating to form a government. That's what's going on here. This is a moment where serious big changes are being discussed. Congress is dysfunctional. Going back to something like regular order, and contemplating the big policy changes that have been stymied for decades is important. Once a speaker is in, we're likely on autopilot for two years as far as these big questions are concerned. Let the wrangling go on!
And kudos to these two for actually listening and reporting on what is going on, rather than passing on the usual tropes.
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Update: The comments have gone off on a tangent involving consumption taxes. See here for how to structure a progressive VAT. Applying lower tax rates for tacos than for Lamborghinis is a terrible way to make consumption tax more progressive. The proposal shows how to do it with the same tax rate on every good, by exempting the first x thousand of consumption from the tax.
Better, we can also stop trying to do two things with one tool. Have a flat VAT, and use the money to send checks to whomever you want to send checks too. Each separate instrument need not be progressive, what counts is the progressively of the whole tax and transfer system.
