Day: August 29, 2016

There was news that the Republicans are already plotting their schemes to obstruct President Hillary Clinton's plans for her first 100 days, and they plan to deny she has any mandate to govern. Jonathan Chait goes LOL, and says mandates are meaningless.

A mandate is an archaic holdover from the bygone age of weak, ideologically heterogeneous parties. Crossing the aisle was common, so if Washington believed that a president had run on a clear agenda, Congress might feel some added moral pressure to pass it. (This happened in 1981, when the Democratic-controlled House enacted Ronald Reagan’s economic program.) In other words, the mandate is a political norm, a broadly if not perfectly shared sense of how politics ought to be conducted. Like most 20th-century American political norms — “filibusters should only be used rarely,” “the president has a right to fill Supreme Court vacancies with somebody qualified and not too extreme” — it is disappearing. The negative mandate of George W. Bush’s 2000 popular-vote defeat did not discourage him or his party from passing the largest tax cut they could; neither of Barack Obama’s clear victories gave Republicans any pause in opposing the policies he ran on. The obsession with a mandate, in which the style and scope of a Clinton victory has crucial ramifications, complicates what is actually a simple series of binary questions. If Democrats control only the presidency next year, Clinton will direct foreign policy and implement federal regulations. If her party adds the Senate, she will also have the ability to nominate judges to open seats. If Democrats win the above plus the House of Representatives, they will be able to pass major legislation for two years (after which Republicans would almost certainly regain their House majority during the midterms). Clinton’s “mandate” is irrelevant. All that matters is the levers of power she commands.

Take over Congress. Go nuclear on the filibuster rule, eliminating all holds and requiring the Senator to stand there until they die in order to filibuster a bill. And then pass your agenda with your majority. That is how you govern in this new order. Fuck mandates. Hillary could win all 50 states and the GOP will declare her an illegitimate President because 1) she is a woman and 2) she only beat Trump.