Maybe Joe Manchin will come around? If there is no filibuster, he automatically becomes the most important senator on every vote. If there is a filibuster, he's just some guy with limited power in a useless body.

Imagine trying to prognosticate what the 2020 election would be like and what would drive it on November 30th, 2016.

I'm feeling the Minivetomentum. Minimentum?

To elaborate, I think you've plotted the central scenario, but we work in hopes of changing the underlying tendencies. The more practical answer for present purposes is we have no idea.

If Georgia flips, we do probably get a big relief package, which matters. (Did you know the US $600/month was more generous at the low end than topless enlightened Europe gave, and may have actually reduced poverty? Not that that was the intention, it was a last-minute kludge, but still.)

I'm hearing that the economic team Biden is hiring is mostly (entirely?) not deficit hawks, which is a big change as far as potential executive action goes.

There's a whole lot that gets done at the agency level.

Trump has demonstrated that you can use 'actings' whenever you need -- and I don't know anything about this, but maybe they can engineer a recess under the provisions of article II section 3 by adjourning Congress over McConnell's objection, and then do a bunch of recess appointments.

But yes, winning Senate races in more states would have been really good. We might well win some Senate seats in 2022 -- last I looked the map wasn't awful -- and God alone knows how the continuing consequences of Donald Trump personal inadequacies are going to play out.

Trump has demonstrated that you can use 'actings' whenever you need

I thought not for purposes of issuing regulations? Which is also important.

If we win the Georgia seats, all I can think of is that it has to be possible to give Joe Manchin everything he's ever dreamed of for himself and for West Virginia. Pave the damn state with gold, it's not that big.

Very original thought.

7: Depends if Manchin thinks suffering is helpful, as many, even Democrats, do.

I think the problem has been that he's not doing the acting thing right.

Anyway, recess appointments are going to be the way, if McConnell really is going to be the total obstructionist we know he wants to be.

Or inducing a Republican or two to break ranks. Biden should have everyone involved in Jeffords' 2001 switch come meet with him. He was there and knows them all, and they can decide who they think is the weakest link, and what the price will be.

I'm imagining getting the House to include some sort of unbelievably sweet deal for the state of the target senator in various bills, and make McConnell have to either say no or agree to stuff.

Everyone thinks suffering is helpful. We disagree on who should suffer.

Biden should have everyone involved in Jeffords' 2001 switch come meet with him.

Were other GOP senators now sitting involved in that switch? I have a hard time seeing how that example (a Vermont Republican!) is at all instructive to to today. But I guess I agree he should try every conceivable angle to pry off some senators.

It had something to do with the dairy industry. A dairy compact? It wasn't just that it was Vermont -- statewide Republicans can certainly win there -- but there was a concrete benefit that Bush wasn't going to deliver.

Cheese is compact dairy.

This says New England wanted protection of their six-state compact to help their dairy industry and the bigger-industry Midwest reps didn't, and says the Democratic majority was still "torn" after Jeffords's switch. That's August 2001, so I have no idea what happened thereafter.

Wikipedia says the compact expired Sept. 30, 2001 and was not replaced, but implies the 2002 farm bill replaced it with direct payments to dairy farmers nationwide tied to the market price in Boston. That's one way to fill mouths with gold, I guess.

Fixed link.

Is there any chance of restoring the existence of earmarks, to give people reasons to vote for things? Instead of the system where they spent a month going back and forth with Bart Stupak saying "I would be betraying my own convictions and my constituents by voting for this bill, I wish I could have a good reason for changing my stance and voting for it" and Rahm Emanuel saying "Sorry Bart, I guess you just have to say that you've betrayed your convictions, and then you'll lose your election"

I thought earmarks were coming back?

New England milk is so much better than that Midwestern shit.

15-17 (thanks Minivet) get at something that is so baffling to me. Economic relations between countries, between states, between any entities but the most destitute really, seem to me to take the form "We have a surplus! Take some so we don't have to burn it." "Oh, we have a surplus too. Let's squabble!" There's too much everywhere-- certainly too much dairy in the US, but also too many cars, too much paint, too many educated people. Unclenching and working 30 hours/week to make merely enough rather than make too much is just not an option though, because reasons.

The starting point, that there are widespread surpluses, seems to me both obvious and unremarked upon. Maybe it's insulting to say it in the US to the many who are not doing well; but acknowledging that with only a fraction of people employed produce everything that's necessary and cheap phones as well seems to me like a starting point to discussing basic income or more generosity with social spending.
Even the deficit bullshit fits into a looser version of this-- bonds pay basically zero or less, inconsistent with claims that extreme debt burdens have frightened the entities with control over savings.

I went to high school with a dairy farmer's kid.

The contrast between agriculture and housing makes me more convinced of this SMBC comic, or in more academic terms, the garbage-can model. In agriculture, leftists see huge excess production and blame late capitalism. In urban housing, huge shortages, and they blame the same. In both cases, there's a lot of rent-seeking and big owners exploiting their positions with lobbying, but that exploitation doesn't require surpluses or shortages, and didn't actively create either.

Unclenching and working 30 hours/week to make merely enough rather than make too much is just not an option though, because reasons.

AIMHMHB in 1930 Keynes reckoned that we would see people working just 15 hours a week by the 1970s, and we are pretty much at that stage now - at least, we are at that stage now if you're happy with living like an average person in 1930. Roughly 18-20 hours of work a week at today's average wage in the US (or the UK for that matter) gets you the average weekly income of a person in your country in 1930.
Average people in 1930, though, were (unlike Keynes) really poor. Even in Britain and the US. The median residence in Glasgow in 1951 would now be considered legally unfit for human habitation.

2018 average hourly pay in UK: £11.82.
Average weekly pay in 1930 - £3.77; equivalent (at RPI inflation rates) to £227.62 in 2018, or 19.2 hours' work.
A full-time national living wage job today, for comparison, will get you £305.20 a week.

I don't know about your island, but here looking at averages is very misleading for income. Also, half-time employment pays much less than half of what full-time employment pays. Half-time jobs are usually only an option for low wage work here. Some of that is because of health insurance, but not all.

Some of my colleagues have come up with an elegant solution: They have full-time jobs, but only work about half the time.

It's frustrating how little interest the ostensible party of the "forgotten" states has in actually doing anything for those states. It wouldn't be hard to turn West Virginia University into a world class university, all it requires is huge piles of money. And then you end up with lots of good construction jobs both at the university and in building new housing in town (provided you actually legalize building new housing). Conversely if Democrats would pick some areas to put huge government investment in, they'd quickly become democratic. Move the capital to like a square at the intersection of Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas, and make DC a state. Start a national university (Federal Institute of Technology?) and put it in Dubuque Iowa.

Puzzled. There's no shortage of urban housing in Chicago or Cleveland. There are really high property taxes in Chicago, and I'd guess in other places with similar financial obligations, which makes mass cheap housing hard to do.

Yes, corporate misbehavior is the source of subsidized overproduction. That's complicated to explain convincingly though. My thought was to counter the soundbite of "how will we pay" with an equally pithy phrase pointing out that there's too much capacity already. Won't help with nimbys or car culture or solve solve problems they cause. I see those as genuinely different though.

27. I see what you mean, but I think from the perspective of a deplorable, you're assuming facts not in evidence. They're telling those states' citizens how great they are rather than suggesting they move or learn cyber and also doing their best to punish their obvious enemies (city folk, foreigners, black people). That's a successful relationship.

Or inducing a Republican or two to break ranks. Biden should have everyone involved in Jeffords' 2001 switch come meet with him. He was there and knows them all, and they can decide who they think is the weakest link, and what the price will be.

The weakest link is Murkowski, and the price is drilling in ANWR.

28: I agree the housing shortage is limited to specific (but very populous) metro areas where law and markets shook out differently. NY, SF, LA, DC, several others.

There are lots of cities on the Missouri and I'm guessing that the intersection of Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri doesn't have a city for some topographic reason.

Anyway, I'm opposed to making WVU a better university because they killed the Big East.

Could you just have the federal government pay a market rate for ANWR and put the money directly in the APF? Or is the point that her donors are in the oil industry?

32: That exact location has an Indian reservation on the Kansas/Nebraska side, which probably has something to do with why there isn't a city there.

32: You could say the same thing about DC, where there were great geographic reasons there wasn't a city there. At any rate the obvious reason there's no city there is that Kansas City is quite nearby. Basically I want a DC to Kansas City's Baltimore.

Rats, 35 is a strong argument.

It's like you don't even remember St. Joseph, Missouri.

34: There's an emotional symbolism to drilling in ANWR for a lot of Alaskans including Murkowski personally (similar to the emotional valence of preventing drilling there for environmentalists). It's unlikely to bring in much money by oil industry standards, certainly not enough to solve Alaska's dire fiscal crisis.

Right, but it's death to the Biden coalition.

It seems a really weird thing to care about in-and-of-itself, I would have thought the jobs and money were the point. But if it's the symbolism, I don't see why you couldn't do some kind of swap where you allow drilling there and expand protected areas somewhere without oil. It's not perfect, but it seems like it'd be worth the senate.

There was an article about who should be Agriculture Secretary that was good. How much is Biden willing to reward Clyburn and support a hunger Advocate and help small black farmers, vs how much does he want to reach out to the rural Midwest/ big Ag.

Mitch McConnell obstructing everyone infuriates me.

I really don't want Rahm Emmanuel in the administration. His brother Zeke is on the COVID task advisory group.

We may not be able to pass anything bigger, but I really want to banish the deficit hawks. From what Krugman and DeLong say, it sounds like Janet Yellen is a good pick for Treasury Secretary.

40: Right, Biden won't do it, because it has an emotional resonance on the other side too that is equally out of proportion to its ecological significance. But if he wants to get her, that will be the ask.

Does it really have emotional resonance to Biden? Like obviously it has emotional resonance to hardcore environmentalists, and to Alaskans on either side of the issue, but there's no obvious reason for Biden to care.

But if it's the symbolism, I don't see why you couldn't do some kind of swap where you allow drilling there and expand protected areas somewhere without oil. It's not perfect, but it seems like it'd be worth the senate.

There's not much land left in Alaska that isn't already protected and also doesn't have oil. Most of the places that aren't protected are that way precisely because of mineral development potential. Also, the environmental activist world would be furious and would probably never forgive Biden.

44: The environmentalists are an important part of his coalition, and they already don't trust him because of his moderate reputation. I don't see him doing anything high-profile to cross them.

It doesn't have to be in Alaska. I dunno, what about half of Wyoming? They don't have Democratic senators there.

Where are the environmentalists going? They're going to vote for Republicans? You lose some small fraction of the vote in CA? I think most young people care more about climate change.

It doesn't have to be in Alaska. I dunno, what about half of Wyoming? They don't have Democratic senators there.

That land's already been drilled. The thing about Alaska is that it's (theoretically) unspoiled wilderness, that can get locked up before it gets ruined by development. There's not much in the Lower 48 that's similar.

Where are the environmentalists going? They're going to vote for Republicans? You lose some small fraction of the vote in CA? I think most young people care more about climate change.

Climate change isn't an environmental issue? These aren't different people, they're the same young climate activists (and some older Sierra Club types, of course). They'll vote Green or not at all. They're not really a reliable part of the coalition.

46; He could win the environmentalist over cheaply by condemning Saiselgy.

I think getting action on climate change is more important than wilderness, and you need the senate to do it.

Well, Murkowski's not going to vote for a Green New Deal, and neither will Manchin, so any climate change action you get in a Senate where they're the pivotal votes is going to be pretty weak tea relative to the scale of the problem. And drilling for oil is hardly a neutral action climate-wise.

Fair enough. Still if it were me, trading drilling in ANWR for a $15 minimum wage is on its own a good trade. The votes you lose to the Green Party are mostly wasted votes anyway. And in the long run killing the Republican Party is the only hope for the environment anyway. And it'd be good for the country if this meant the Greens got some CA house seats now and then.

I'm not sure Lisa's a yes on a $15 minimum wage either, to be honest. She's legitimately moderate for a Republican these days, but still very much a Republican. I don't think substantive outcomes are likely to be very different in a Senate this closely divided regardless of which side she's on. (Procedural things and confirmations are different and definitely important, though.)

Regardless, I'm thinking of buying some Biden wine glasses to toast the inauguration.

I'm skeptical, party switchers almost always end up much more in the mainstream of their new party than their prior votes would suggest. As a Republican she might not vote for a minimum wage increase, but as a Democrat or an independent caucusing with the democrats it's hard for me to imagine she wouldn't support it. At any rate, opposing a minimum wage increase is obviously too big an ask for it to be worth it, so if she was asking for that then I'm out.

Isn't the Supreme Court going to force through drilling in ANWR anyway, regardless of what the Biden administration does?

Or maybe a '46' hat.

Speaking of Manchin,* Here's a charming little WaPo article on epistemic closure and teaching the election in a Civics class in a rural part of WV. Teacher points out how the Coivd at home stuff has made it harder as there are often parents listening in. (And my guess is that he is about to "go through some things" after this article.) I think people are grossly underestimating the ungovernability of this country for the next few years in any normal sense (see next post).

Greg Cruey thought he knew how to walk students through a presidential election. The social studies teacher has been working inside public-school classrooms for about two decades, guiding children through history-making 2008, as well as tumultuous 2016. But 2020 shocked him. Never before, Cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children -- such blind devotion to their preferred candidate, most often Donald Trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized.

*If Dems win the 2 GA's would he be a risk of switching to R? I'm thinking the big restraint might be that he would likely be oprinaried but some truly right-wing horror if he ran as an R. (IIRC WV allows you to vote either R or D if you are independent/non-affiliated but not switchover from R to D without a registration change.)

If Dems do not control Senate.

My scenarios of number of judges confirmed in next two years:
Median 0, Mode 0, Mean 20 (where some R-provided judges make it through). Probably being too alarmist, there may be a Romney/Collins/Murkowski bloc that tries to keep a semblance of "normalcy". But will Mitch even bring them to a vote*?
Also less than half his initial Cabinet/top picks will be confirmed.

*Let me be JP the Whiny Political media Basher for a moment. The manner in which the press has *not* covered the total insanity of McConnell's utter abandonment of any principled management of the Senate. They barely even bother to report on how the bills passed in the House are not even brought up for discussion**. Savvy fuckwads savvying democracy to death. There is one video of a gaggle of reporters and Mitch (aka Ofsatan) where he is asked about the prospects for HR 1 (the 2019 voting rights bill) and he makes a lame "joke" about how it won't make the floor since he is the decider. Everyone laughs with him. I hate them all so very, very much.

**I do think blocking of judges and Cabinet picks would get more attention, but undoubtedly in some new infuriating way.

I've been telling myself that we'll either get both or neither of the GA Senate seats; surely there is no split ticket that likes one but not the other. But just now I remembered racism and realized how we could get one (but Jewish!) and not the other.

Over on Twitter, I blocked their names and the name of the state and it has been lovely. I sent my money and now I don't want to know the details.

David Dayen over at The Prospect has a Day 1 agenda of things Biden can do in the executive branch and I haven't read it or anything, so there you go.

Pave the damn state with gold, it's not that big.

Just for funsies: to pave the entirety West Virginia with a gold plating 1 mm thick would take 1.2*10^10 g of gold, or 3.86*10^8 troy ounces. There are 13.4 million troy ounces of gold held by the Fed in New York (with an amount to the same order of magnitude in Fort Knox), so we'd only need about 29 Feds worth of gold. At current spot prices, said gold would be worth $21.3 trillion dollars, about eleven times the cost of the Iraq War. This is approximately 1/16th of all gold known to have ever been mined.

Honestly, that's a lot more feasible than I thought, so if Joe Manchin said this is his price for luxury space communism, I'd say go for it.

You need more for the sides of buildings.

Megan, I hope you're leveraging your contacts to get into a political appointment.

59: I'd happily take a bet where I get paid if Warnock wins and Ossoff loses, and loses if it goes the other way around.

I find the "split ticket" problem in Georgia fascinating. Neither candidate would be likely to win in a separate runoff becasue turn out would be too low outside of thir core demographic. But together, they'd be a dream balanced ticket if they were running on the same line: white and black, London School of Economics and Union Theological Seminary, youth and gravitas, etc. Each has to push turn out fron their own group, and also make sure that everyone who turns out for one votes for both. This is not a typical problem in U.S. politics, and I hope they have a strategy.

60: Gold leaf is three or four orders of magnitude thinner than 1mm, though. So less than $20 billion of gold. Totally doable!

So we legitimately say: "Thair's gold in them thar hills!"

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain midas
Take me home, country roads

You don't have to pave the entire state with gold, just the streets, which is a lot less expensive. Heck, you could probably pave them with asphalt and people would be happy.

Further to 59. Swing voters aren't so much racist in the sense that they don't want to vote for a black person, they're racist in the sense that when they do mildly racist things they don't want to be called out on it or have to feel bad about it. This is why Obama got so many more "racist" voters. Voting for Black candidates makes mildly racist swing voters feel good about themselves, while voting for "woke" white people makes them feel bad about themselves.

Manchin interview in the Times. mixed. A lot of centrist/world's greatest deliberative body BS, but reaffirms his "Demness." Sort of.

I just can't believe that 72 million people were either that mad or that scared of the Democrat Party to vote for what I consider a very flawed individual. Here's a person who lost 230,000 lives under his watch, basically denounced the science completely because it might hurt him politically, has a lack of compassion or empathy for humans, and denigrates anybody and everybody that does not agree with him. How 72 million people could still walk in and say, 'Yeah, it's better than that,' I just can't figure it out. That was a sobering thing for me. My state got wiped out this election. So I would say, I'm just looking at myself, I have not been good at my message. I know why I'm a Democrat. And I know that I've never seen the Democrat Party forsake anybody.

But did he really say "*Democrat* Party." I guess it's just not for Neil Gorsuch* and the klepto-autocrats anymore.

*Obligatory Stormcrow media rant; Remember when Neil Gorsuch referred to "democrat judges" in his hearing and it was not even mentioned in their both sides fukleheadedness especially coming as it did after the Garland stall.

Amanda Carpenter's vision of the future of the GOP is plenty bleak. but you gotta love her dig at her former boss.

CCarp, I haven't the faintest idea how to do that. If it is going to be a good Bureau of Reclamation, I'd love to be part of it, a deputy director or something. But my real self doesn't look qualified, and it is hard to list OtPR's credentials.

Someone you know knows decision makers on the VP elect's staff who can hook you up with the people staffing interior. You would take a job in DC rather than stay in the region?

You don't wait to be asked for these jobs, you get your cv and your passion vouched for by someone with juice.

There ought to be an updated version of the plum book. Here's the 2016 version: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2016/pdf/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2016.pdf Maybe it comes out later in the week?

if you're between 20 and 29 years old, they shower you with 100 points just for existing

110 points if you are "without a spouse or common-law partner"!

The language (well, I mean the concept, and its underlying ideology...) of "human capital factors" here is just so depressing and dispiriting.

OK, the Sacto positions are nearly all held by career incumbents. You could be the marshal, though?

I would have taken a shot at a political appointment in the Warren Administration. I wrote that nice letter to the editor for her and everything.

Alas, Biden owes me nothing.

No, he owes all of us a first rate team. The way decent people, and not hacks, get into these positions is by stepping up and making themselves known.

And Spike, once you've set your sights on a position, you can totally approach Sen Warren for ideas to proceed. It's a small town: her people know the people. She'll be glad to have a friend somewhere, and whoever you end up reporting to is going to be damn glad that someone who actually knows something, not just knows someone, is getting the shit done.

I'll definitely check out the Plum Book but I've got a pretty good gig as it is, and I'm not looking to move back to the DC area from woodland paradise anytime soon.

I think what I would really want would be to get appointed to some minor federal commission or delegation or expert group or blue ribbon panel or something. Unfortunately I'm not really an expert on anything anymore.

74: Do you know how it works for the spouse of a Canadian citizen?

Tim has a friend who was living in Ireland for a while. He married an Englishwoman there. With Brexit, their jobs weren't looking so great. The company transfer to Florida didn't work out, so he got a job in Montreal. She was able to come with him, but she wasn't allowed to work, at least initially.

«if you're between 20 and 29 years old, they shower you with 100 points just for existing»

It is for being a (net) taxpayer. Point systems for immigration are designed to select people with the potential to pay much more tax than the value of state services than they receive (at least for some decades), to fund the services and cut the taxes on older incumbent voters. The deal is roughly: you can immigrate as long as you pay for the pension and healthcare of existing older incumbents.

Point systems targeted at that were designed in Australia, and I read a candid article that reported that in the 1970s the australian government were worries that so many australian youngsters preferred to spend their days on Bondi Beach rather than getting degrees and starting businesses, so they would be unable to pay the taxes to fund the very comfortable pensions and healthcare that the generation of their parents had voted for themselves, so they created an immigration system that selected for young, hard working, educated asians as taxpayers. They also created a policy of booming property prices so that immigrants would also have to pay huge housing costs to incumbent property owners in addition to large net taxes.

80: Spouses don't require a point assessment; being a partner to a Canadian is sufficient (nb you don't have to be married or heterosexual). You have to wait until you get your permanent residency to work but when my husband did it, that took well under a year.

Also nb I am not actually a lawyer or immigration expert

but she wasn't allowed to work, at least initially.

My guess is that she waiting for her permanent residency paperwork to go through.

Or, what hydrobatidae said in 82.

83: I think you can apply for it while you are still abroad, but that didn't work for them, because they couldn't take a job and have her stay in Ireland. Only having one income while they were waiting wasn't easy for them.

OT: I wonder who was trying to bribe Trump for a pardon and was so bad at it that even Barr noticed?

85: The breadcrumbs include that they're already in federal prison and their name ends in 's'.

80: No points assessment, but you might have to wait a while before you can work, although you can start the process abroad.

I can get Italian citizenship if I learn the language to B1 proficiency. This sounds like the plot of a bad movie.

Trump is sundowning.

Is the "National Defense Authorization Act" as big of a thing as it sounds like?

So if he vetoes the NDAA, how is the military going to be able to conduct a new election under martial law?

The NDAA is the military budget, ie. the only part of the state Republicans have thus far been unwilling to hold hostage. And dumb and destructive as this is, desanctifying the military is one of the few Trumpisms that would be worth running with.

Bruce Sterling's excellent book "Distraction" opens with a description of a defunded USAF base running a bake sale to raise money. He correctly realises that this would not be a good thing in any sense (it's backed up by surveillance drones and OSINT).

I bet the Navy has better cookies too.

The USAF has too many fundamentalist types and that kind usually goes for overly processed, too sweet food.

Of course, over here the air force was raising money by running bake sales (among other things) within living memory. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35697546
They raised £650 million, adjusted for inflation - but, in general, if you're having to do things like that, it's a sign not that your government has a laudably sceptical attitude to the value of air power, but that you are desperately trying not to be enslaved by a bunch of genocidal idiots.

I bet the Navy has better cookies too.

The scene's set in Louisiana, so the USAF are selling chicory coffee and beignets.

Oh, local talent. That would work, but don't drink that coffee.

I was surprised to find myself, between 10 and 15 years ago, becoming more of a fan of the Navy. (My grandfather and an uncle went to West Point, and we rooted for those guys at the game.) I'm not going to say that Navy cookies would be better, but you would expect more variety, and personal touches by the cook.

Unrelatedly, here's a trailer for a movie coming out next year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tmxxzZXLEM&feature=emb_logo

My dad was in the Navy, but never as an officer. My uncle was a career naval officer, but didn't go to the academy. He signed up after Pearl Harbor and left decades later as a commander.

I guess he signed up in 1938.

98.2 Looks interesting! Is the Jodie Foster character based on you?

OT: This hearing is like the line-up of villains in "Blazing Saddles," except more Klansmen and more women.

101 Hah, no. But an excellent lawyer out of NM. With a much more articulate client who could/did write a book.

https://fbdlaw.com/attorney-profiles/nancy-hollander/

The sort of person it's an honor to be on a conference call with.