The idea that it’s even coherent to talk about “politicizing” the attempted assassination of a politician strikes me as questionable. But since typically people die without being assassinated, and there are still always allegations of nefarious “politicization” of their deaths, I’d like to go on record as saying that when I decided to write about politics and policy for a living that wasn’t just a weird coincidence. I actually really care about these things. They’re very important to me. And if I die tomorrow or next week or next month or next year or (hopefully!) decades from now and still-living allies want to take the occasion to try to advance progress on the issues I care about, I would applaud that.

I imagine in the wake of this Arizona shooting that there’ll be a move to deliver more security around members of congress as they travel in-state. I think that would be a real mistake. As horrible as what happened this weekend is, the fact of the matter is that political assassinations are extremely rare and it’s simply not the case that the country faces some kind of systematic assassination problem. What’s we do have in the United States is an unusually high level of violent crime across the board, but pulling police resources off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians is going to make that worse.

The change that we ought to be making, however, is an institutional one relating to the question of what happens if someone shoots a United States Senator. I think it would sit poorly with all of us if assassinating a senator led to a change in partisan control of the senate via gubernatorial appointment, but many states’ laws leave the door open to that possibility. Senators ought to be replaced, in my view, either through a special election or else through an appointee pre-designated by the Senator as a legitimate proxy for his or her approach to politics.

This is the kind of thing that we tend not to think about until after it’s happened, but by that time it’s too late. The political system itself needs to be made as resilient as possible to attempted violent interventions.

I was at a party last night featuring some of the young stars of progressive writing (Dylan Matthews, Ned Resnikoff, etc.) when some folks in the next room fired up No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs” on Rock Band.

The young folks are familiar with the tune, but I wondered if they really understood what it meant to screen one’s phonecalls. The answer turned out to be: Not really. The consensus view was that it had something to do with checking caller ID. The truth, of course, is implicit right there in the chorus: “Sorry I’m not home right now / I’m walking in a spiderweb / So leave a message and I’ll call you back / A likely story but leave a message and I’ll call you back.” The speaker doesn’t have caller ID (which was bleeding edge technology at the time) so instead she was screening her phone calls by letting the answering machine pick up the phone and deliver her outbound message. Then the caller would start to talk, identifying himself, and the screener would either pick up the phone or else ignore the message. Hence the sarcasm of “a likely story.”

At any rate, consider that a lesson for the young people and a chilling reminder to the rest of us of how old we are.

Excellent post from Greg Ip on the strange notion of giving Representative Paul Ryan an award for commitment to deficit reduction:

It’s a good thing for Mr Ryan the Fiscy relates only to the fiscal year that ended on September 30th, because ever since then he’s been acting less like a deficit hawk. Like Mr Conrad, Mr Ryan was a member of the Bowles-Simpson commission. Unlike Mr Conrad, he voted against its plan to stabilise the debt despite calling it “serious and credible”. He opposed it because it left Mr Obama’s health-care reform intact, and because it relied too much on tax increases, even though these were smaller than the plan’s spending cuts. The opposition by Mr Ryan and his two fellow House Republicans more or less guaranteed the plan would die.

A few days later Mr Ryan congratulated Mr Obama for acting “responsibly” in capitulating to Republicans and agreeing to an $800 billion-plus package that extends all of George Bush’s tax cuts and implements new temporary stimulus composed overwhelmingly of tax cuts. Whatever its merits as stimulus, its complete absence of any linkage to long-term deficit reduction is antithetical to the principals behind the Fiscy. [...]

[T]he most important reason to question Mr Ryan’s deficit-hawk credentials was his support for certain changes to the budget process to constrain spending. Specifically, “Paygo”, the current rule that requires any cut in taxes or increase in spending be offset by equivalent tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, will be replaced with “Cutgo”, which imposes that requirement only on spending. The new rules could actually weaken rather than strengthen, deficit reduction; so says none other than the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

I’m a liberal. And I think, as does everyone who thinks about it for fifteen minutes, that the debt:GDP ratio needs to be stabilized over the long-term and that stabilizing it at a relatively low level would be better than stabilizing it at a high level. And I think the kind of people who give out “fiscy” awards don’t want liberals to immediately put their fingers in their ears when people start talking about deficit reduction. But it’s impossible for progressives to take the organized deficit reduction movement seriously under these circumstances.

Via Brad DeLong, here’s a bit on the new Speaker:

Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, [Steve] Driehaus “may be a dead man” and “can’t go home to the west side of Cincinnati” because “the Catholics will run him out of town,” Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house. Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.

“I didn’t think it was funny at all,” Driehaus says. “I’ve got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, ‘John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.’”

Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn’t think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. “But it’s not about what he intended — it’s about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work.”

Driehaus says Boehner was “taken aback” when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: “He said something along the lines of, ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’ But he didn’t apologize.”

I’ll also just note that the specific anti-abortion argument against the Affordable Care Act is a particularly deranged version of the “life begins at conception and ends at birth” version of the world.

Here’s some interesting quantitative analysis from Alan Abramowitz, illustrating a point that seems qualitatively true. In the 1970s, voting for both the House and Senate was only very weakly correlated with presidential voting. In the 80s, the correlation got stronger. In the 1990s, the correlation got stronger. And in the 2000s, it’s got even stronger.

I’d say it’s largely a good thing that we now have more ideologically coherent parties and a more rigorously consistent political system. But political institutions need to adapt to that reality.