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May 11, 2005
Small point of Poli-Sci Geekery:
Just a pair of connected points here.
There is a field in Political Science that uses lots of numbers and graphs. The idea is that you can measure preferences and put them on a line. One such expression of this allows votes in Congress to be analyzed not on content but purely on the basis of who voted yes or no in relation to who else did...
For instance. Congress votes. Everyone who voted “Yea” moves one step to the right, everyone who voted “nay” moves one step to the left. Repeat with a hundred different votes. You end up with a pretty good indicator: when Kennedy votes one way, Santorum votes the other. Using this kind of analisis, Slate gives us a Map of congressional polarization...
We’ve heard recently that Senate Democrats are threatening to “shut down” the Senate if the Senate Republicans use the “Nuclear” option. How Senate Dems. plan to do this is by getting rid of the consent calendar...
The consent calendar is a device used to simply pass routine bills. All items on this calendar are voted on simultaneously, unanimity being required for passage. If any Senator objects to a bill being placed on the consent calendar, it is removed, and a vote (and the debate a vote entails) must be taken on that bill separately...
Democrats are threatening to object to everything on the consent calendar, causing a separate vote to happen on every issue before them. Since there are hundreds of issues on the calendar each week, this will make Senate traffic about as swift as Los Angeles’ traffic...
Since, however, the bills on the Calendar are routine, day to day, and uncontroversial, you would tend to expect unanimous agreement on each item. This would cause apparent-polarization to sharply reverse itself (hundreds of additional same-direction votes each week). The irony will be that there is such apparent harmony precisely because there is actual disharmony!
I think I study politics because I enjoy the hell out of this sort of parliamentary maneuver...
Posted by Andrew at May 11, 2005 09:49 AM
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