I think that we can stipulate that when one party holds a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives, two-thirds of the seats in the Senate, and the White House, it’s a lot easier to enact legislation. But there are still obstacles. When you hold merely a majority in the Senate it’s harder. And when there is divided government, with one party in control of the House and another controls the Senate and the White House, it’s even harder.

But when you have divided government and compromise is impossible, you’ve reached an impasse. It becomes tremendously difficult to address problems and puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of the president.

It didn’t used to be this way. When both major political parties were truly “catch-all” parties with liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, compromise was normal and expected. With the drift to the right and left of the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively, compromise not only became unusual but unthinkable. That is a fundamental impediment to republican government since, as Plato pointed out two millennia ago, compromise is essential to republican government.

In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston lament:

The impasse over Covid-19 legislation is a policy failure with constitutional implications. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday that most issues between congressional Democrats and the Trump administration had been resolved, with the exception of aid to states and localities and the extension of supplementary unemployment insurance payments. No doubt differences of degree remain in other areas, but these seem to be the two main fiscal sticking points. If so, compromise should be within reach.

Democrats are demanding nearly $1 trillion of additional assistance for state and local governments, while Republicans are offering more flexibility for $150 billion previously appropriated. The solution: Meet in the middle. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey have introduced a bill that would distribute $500 billion to states and localities based on a formula that accounts for revenue loss and Covid-19 infection rates, as well as population. The bill has other bipartisan co-sponsors, and so does the companion version introduced in the House.

Led by President Trump, Republicans insist that the federal government should not be in the business of bailing out the budgets and pension funds of profligate states. The Cassidy-Menendez bill would compensate states for a portion of added costs and lower revenues from Covid-19, not for the consequences of past mismanagement. The bill explicitly bars the use of funds to shore up pension funds.

Then there’s the dispute over unemployment benefits. Republicans object to the current $600 weekly federal supplement on the grounds that, when added to state benefits, it can pay unemployed recipients more than they earned on the job and is thus a disincentive to return to work. They have countered with an offer of $200.

Here again, the two sides should be able to compromise. Mr. Trump has signaled his willingness to back a $300 federal contribution. There is some evidence that Democrats may be willing to settle for $400, tapered in stages linked to declining rates of unemployment. These differences can be resolved, assuming the parties want a bill more than a talking point.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is insisting on provisions that protect corporations and other entities against Covid-19 liability claims. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made these changes a priority. Trial lawyers are dead set against them.

A compromise proposal from the bipartisan New Center would give Republicans the protection their business supporters want. In return, employers would be required to meet clear, strong and enforceable workplace safety standards. There would be no verbal loopholes such as “good-faith effort” and “to the extent possible.” Immunity from liability would depend on strict compliance, and workers who allege that employers failed to meet the standard would be protected from retaliation.

His account of the impasse is a bit lopsided. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on record as rejecting any compromise on the weekly federal income supplement at the least. It’s a bipartisan impasse.

I see no easy solution to the problem. It would require changes to Senate and House seniority rules, funding rules, and changes in the way districts are apportioned. A larger House would probably help, too. Eliminating the filibuster would enable strict majoritarianism. Impasse is likely on the menu for a long time.

When you read the section of Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column below on the selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate, keep in mind that 99% of Democratic primary voters voted for candidates other than Sen. Harris in the primaries. Here’s the portion of the column:

As George Will put it after Ferraro died, “she was an instrument—Geraldine Ferraro was—of identity politics, a Catholic woman from Queens.” The result? Mondale lost Catholics and women. Reagan even came close in Queens.

Like all presidential candidates, Mr. Biden was looking for someone to help him—or at least not hurt him—geographically and with certain voting blocs. His campaign has made no secret of his strategy to win back white working-class residents of battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump. It’s hard to see how Ms. Harris will help him with those voters. Barack Obama won them over in 2008 by playing down racial differences on the campaign trail. Ms. Harris’s most memorable moment during the primary was to suggest that Mr. Biden was a racist for expressing opinions about forced busing in the 1970s that turned out to be nearly identical to her own.

The inconvenient truth for progressives is that primary voters bypassed several female and minority candidates—including Ms. Harris—to nominate Mr. Biden. If having a woman on the ticket were a priority for most Democrats, why did Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar flame out? In addition to Ms. Harris, black voters might have opted for Cory Booker if race was a top concern, yet they overwhelmingly went for Mr. Biden. Perhaps liberal elites and their media allies care more about a presidential ticket that “looks like America” than the average Democratic voter does.

My question about the selection of Sen. Harris is, what will its net effect be? Will it result in more votes for Joe Biden, fewer, or make no difference? Have we entered a new domain of politics in which the results don’t matter?

IMO the ticket will receive fewer votes than might otherwise have been the case. Mr. Biden had painted himself into a corner with his pledge to pick a black woman and found it difficult to follow through with that commitment while satisfying the DNC. I still don’t understand why he picked Kamala Harris.

I agree completely with this assessment of VP Joe Biden by David Byler in the New York Times:

Mr. Biden is best understood not as a member of a particular ideological faction but rather as a prototypical “regular Democrat” who has continually sought to personify the existing mainstream of his party — which explains his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as vice-presidential nominee.

Mr. Biden’s 36 years of service in the Senate spanned seven presidential administrations as well as considerable change in both parties’ social coalitions and philosophical precepts. But his voting record always remained firmly at the ideological midpoint of the Democratic Party. According to a measure of congressional ideology developed by the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, during his full tenure in the Senate, Mr. Biden’s party loyalty score was consistently high and his record right in the middle of the pack among Democrats.

Right-leaning commentators who see Mr. Biden as dashing to the left in recent months are correct to the extent that he’s dashing to the left of the Democratic Party which itself has moved to the left, pushed to no small extent by Sen. Bernie Sanders, especially in relation to the Republican Party. They’re wrong to see him as a radical leftist.

I can recognize a “regular Democrat” when I see one—it is overwhelmingly the type of the Chicago Democrat and it is very different from what a “coastal Democrat” has become these days. A regular Democrat believes in government solutions; they tend to support public employees, especially teachers, police officers, and firefighters. They always vote for the regular party candidate; they tend to disapprove of or even disdain Republicans. They are not overly scrupulous about what George Washington Plunkitt referred to as “honest graft”.

You might be interested in this piece by Helen Branswell at STAT:

The good news: The United States has a window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 before things get much, much worse.

The bad news: That window is rapidly closing. And the country seems unwilling or unable to seize the moment.

Maybe I haven’t been playing close enough attention but I have yet to hear any workable strategy proposed by anybody that would “beat back Covid-19”. What I have heard is wear facemasks, social distancing, testing, and contact tracing. The missing step in that strategy is contact tracing to what end? I presume it is quarantine. That voluntary quarantines are ineffective should be obvious at this point, cf. Melbourne. Or New Zealand for that matter. If they do not work in Australia or New Zealand, how in the heck could they ever work in the U. S.? Can anyone imagine an involuntary quarantine at the scale required being maintained in the U. S.? I can’t. All you need to do is picture the list of prospective quarantinees in Chicago, largely consisting of blacks and Hispanics, to recognize that it would never work.

An additional complexity I have yet to see being addressed is how anyone could anticipate any national plan to “beat back Covid-19” without getting control over our southern border. Cross-border contagion will stymie any such plan. First, Mexicans contracted SARS-CoV-2 in the U. S. and brought it home. Increasingly and as the case mortality rate continues to rise in Mexico, it will be from Mexico to the United States. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Most of the reactions I have encountered so far are about you’d expect—kneejerk condemnations from diehard Trump supporters, equally kneejerk enthusiastic declarations of support from those who probably would have said much the same things whoever Biden picked. The reaction of the editors of the Washington Post is typical of the latter:

When she entered the presidential race, many handicappers picked her as the likely winner. The campaign that followed was something of a disappointment. Like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who also had served as a prosecutor before joining the Senate, Ms. Harris found herself somewhat wrong-footed by the Democratic Party’s turn toward criminal justice reform. She wavered on how much to embrace her own law enforcement record, as she did on Medicare-for-all and a few other fraught issues.

None of that is all that unusual in a first-time presidential candidate, and she exited the presidential field with her integrity and reputation intact. She showed herself to be a tough debater, including when she challenged Mr. Biden; it’s to both of their credit that they are ready to move on from that. She also exited as a plausible ideological soul mate for Mr. Biden, who has worked hard to accommodate the left wing of his party without acceding to all of its wishes.

Running to replace a president who has celebrated incompetence and elevated incompetents, Mr. Biden needed to choose a running mate who respects public service and has served well. In Sen. Kamala Harris, he has found such a partner.

while that of Kevin Williamson at the National Review characteristic of the former:

Harris’s self-serving prosecutorial abuses have been directed at political enemies, but they also put hundreds — maybe thousands — of people in jail or at risk of prosecution on wrongful grounds when it suited her agenda.

[…]

In the context of Harris’s political vendettas, that eagerness to engage in “systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights” is particularly terrifying.

In choosing this corrupt prosecutor as his vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden has made a serious error, one that highlights his already substantial deficiencies in judgment.

I did, however, encounter a handful of insightful observations.

The first was from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark:

Her selection suggests that the campaign believes their position is very strong. They think that the progressive wing of the party is with them and did not need to be tended to. They believe the heart of their coalition in November is going to be African Americans and college-educated suburban whites, both of whom should respond well to Harris.

It also shows that this is a steady, well-managed campaign that has the discipline to not get cute and out-smart itself.

But the biggest thing the Harris pick says is this: They think they’re going to win.

I thought the obserations of the editors of the Wall Street Journal were worth considering:

Mr. Biden may have backed himself into the corner of having to choose Ms. Harris. He limited his choices by promising to select a woman, and the black Democrats who saved him in South Carolina pressed for a black woman. Then the Sanders wing pressed for a progressive, and Ms. Harris is a safer choice by far than Elizabeth Warren.

In this sense the choice is revealing about the unusual nature of Mr. Biden’s candidacy. He won the nomination as the last-ditch, anti-Trump alternative to what would have been the suicidal selection of Bernie Sanders. More than any recent nominee, Mr. Biden is a party figurehead, more than a party leader. In adding Ms. Harris to the ticket, he has underscored that a vote for Mr. Biden isn’t merely a vote to oust Mr. Trump. It’s a vote for the coastal progressives who now dominate the Democratic Party.

while those of Ted Rall in an op-ed there fly in the face of the views of those who think that the young people who have taken to the streets in protest over the last few months can just be taken for granted as Democrats have been taking the votes of blacks for granted over the period of the last 75 years:

By choosing Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden is sending a message to the progressive left base of the Democratic Party: Drop dead.

The choice indicates that Mr. Biden’s centrist establishment handlers view Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 as historically anomalous rather than evidence of a flawed strategy. Democratic conventional wisdom remains mired in the 1990s of Dick Morris and Clintonian third-way triangulation. Donald Trump proved that presidential elections are now about energizing the base to increase turnout. Defying convention as usual, the president has governed the way he campaigned, with red-meat policy and rhetoric unlikely to appeal to Democrats. It’s how he’s running for re-election.

Democrats are challenging him the same way they lost to him in 2016. Determined to put Bernie Sanders’s bruising primary challenge behind her, Mrs. Clinton circular-filed suggestions of a party-unity ticket, and sidelined Mr. Sanders in favor of Tim Kaine. Traditional corporatist liberals twisted themselves into knots trying to convince progressives that he was one of them.

“Kaine has an extremely progressive record overall,” Paul Waldman argued in the American Prospect in July 2016. “He was one of the first Virginia Democrats to turn his back on the way members of his party had traditionally campaigned in the state (bending over backwards to show conservative white voters that they were good ol’ boys); instead, Kaine won races for lieutenant governor, governor, and senator by putting together earlier versions of the Obama coalition, based on African Americans, immigrant groups, and white liberals.”

But building an identity-politics coalition isn’t the same thing as embracing progressive policies. In the end, according to one analysis, less than 80% of Sanders primary voters voted for Mrs. Clinton, and 12% supported Mr. Trump.

Ms. Harris’s backers are repeating the same error. “Joe Biden’s top priority in selecting a running mate will be to choose somebody who can help unite and energize the sprawling, restless Democratic coalition,” Errol Louis said last week on CNN. “At a time when demands for racial justice and inclusion are surging, Harris would be a camera-ready voice from the black base of the party.”

That assumes that being black is good enough for Black Lives Matter. BLM learned from Barack Obama that race didn’t equate to policy. As president, he failed to act meaningfully against police brutality.

It’s hard to believe that younger black voters will look past Ms. Harris’s record as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. “That ‘top cop’ thing has just stuck—she built such a strong brand on it as an AG, as the DA—and it’s hard for people to erase that in their memories,” Chivona Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told the New York Times. Kevin Cooper sits on California’s death row in part because Ms. Harris refused to allow him to obtain advanced DNA testing to demonstrate his innocence. Prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence in the case of George Gage, and Attorney General Harris fought to keep him in prison on a technicality. He’s 80 and still behind bars.

Mr. Biden probably won’t enjoy much of a boost from a running mate primarily chosen to appeal to the older black voters who would have turned out for him anyway. He has certainly alienated progressives.

What I think is emerging for the 2020 election is a battle of the bases, with President Trump doing nothing to expand his base beyond his hardcore supporters and the Biden campaign confident that there are enough voters in enough states who will vote for anyone who isn’t Donald Trump to win in the general election. Historically, that has not been a winning formula but 2020 is a year like no other.

I’ll reserve lengthier comment until I read some of the other reactions, limiting myself to just two. First, I think that there were better candidates among those whom VP Biden reportedly had on his short list.

And, second, I find it a bit embarrassing that Democrats are, apparently, reluctant to nominate candidates who have been reared by black mothers in the context of a black community.

Speaking of what we’re likely to hear a lot more of, at The National Interest issues a warning about China:

The Reductio ad Hitlerum is the distinctive twenty-first-century addition to Aristotle’s classic list of thirteen logical fallacies. It occurs when an argument becomes so heated that one party compares the positions of the other to those of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were so evidently evil that anything associated with them must be bad. So if you want to argue against vegetarianism, just point out that Hitler was a vegetarian. Q.E.D.

In domestic politics, Trump-Hitler comparisons have become so routine that they have lost their shock value: the one saving grace of the personal Reductio ad Hitlerum is that it often says more about its wielder than about its intended victim. International relations scholars, perhaps more knowledgeable about the historical Hitler and his murderous regime, thankfully seem less ready to invoke him to settle petty scores.

And yet, there has now arisen a powerful, totalitarian party-state at the heart of the global economy that seems intent on repressing ethnic minorities and challenging international borders. It alternatively bribes and bullies its weaker neighbors in an attempt to establish an extensive sphere of exclusive influence. Its not-so-charismatic leader has established a cult of personality straight out of the twentieth-century dictator handbook. And it is arming like crazy.

That country is, of course, China.

I take his piece as some combination of a sincere, conscientious worry and battlespace preparation for presidential campaign season. What would President-Elect and President Biden’s attitude towards China be? Will he continue Trump’s trade war? Will he try to restore the status quo ante Trump?

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of reports like this one by Chris Jacobs in the Wall Street Journal in the coming months:

According to their tax returns, in 2017 and 2018 the Bidens and his wife Jill avoided payroll taxes on nearly $13.3 million in income from book royalties and speaking fees. They did so by classifying the income as S-corporation profits rather than taxable wages.

The Bidens did pay themselves “salaries” from their corporations—CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp.—of nearly $750,000 between them over two years, and they paid full taxes on that income. But they circumvented the payroll tax on the nearly 95% of their income that remained. A tax expert interviewed by the Journal in 2019 called the Bidens’ scheme “pretty aggressive”; another told the paper it served solely to avoid the payroll taxes.

Of the taxes the Bidens avoided, 2.9% of their income, around $385,000, would have funded Medicare. The other 0.9%, nearly $120,000, was part of ObamaCare and fund that law.

As I see it there are a number of different ways of viewing that including

• It’s wrong
• It’s legal
• It’s hypocritical
• Trump didn’t reveal his tax returns

but mine is it’s good to be connected. If you or I tried that dodge, we’d be audited and compelled to pay back taxes, interest, and penalties. The corporation obviously exists solely as a tax dodge. But VP Biden is confident he won’t be audited because the politics of the IRS guarantees it.

The only outrageous thing is that things like this are so common.

I’m listening to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s and Police Chief David Brown joint press conference about the incidents of looting and vandalism last night. They didn’t say the words I wanted them to: “This situation is beyond our abilities. Consequently, we are resigning our offices so the jobs may be filled by people who are more competent” but, then, I didn’t expect them to. What they did say was how determined they were and how hard they and the police are working. They also took pains to point fingers at prosecutors (Kim Foxx) and judges (unnamed), characterizing them as too lenient, pointing to a “revolving door”—the police arrest the criminals and the prosecutors and courts reduce their sentences or release them.

The mayor even took offense when asked by one reporter if she thought that last night’s incidents were a reaction to the city’s inability to protect against earlier looting incidents.

Basically, I don’t care how determined they are or how hard they’re working. Results are all I care about and they have none to show. Maintaining order is the fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, what the heck good is it?

Update

Now Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is conducting her own press conference and pushing back in anodyne terms against the mayor’s and Chief Brown’s complaints. She’s up for re-election in November. She should resign. She’s so obviously incompetent I have no words. BTW her campaign is supported by out-of-state money.