As a connoisseur of American conservatism’s problematic relationship with race, I had a lot of fun during the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation fight. Thus in that sense, I’m a bit saddened that the leading names being bandied about to fill the vacancy left by John Paul Stevens are all white people. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with white people (indeed, some of my best friends are white) but if I had my druthers, all high-profile confirmation controversies would be about non-whites. So I’m intrigued by Jonathan Zasloff’s notion of putting Newark Mayor Corey Booker on the bench even though it’s not going to happen.

At any rate, every time a Supreme Court seat comes open about 25% of the pundits in America point out that it would be nice to see Presidents put up some more people who are “politicians with legal experience” rather than appellate judges or whoever’s solicitor general at the moment. But this is one of these things that pundits say not just because it makes for an easy column topic but also because it’s actually true! The Supreme Court is a substantially political court. The whole discourse and atmospherics around the way Court nominees are currently selected and confirmed has become a terrible farce, and the pretense that it’s just about picking people who are really good at looking up what the law is in books is a big part of the problem.

Via Ezra Klein, the Fourth Branch put together a map purporting to show which states get more in federal spending than they pay in taxes:

There is a very strong correlation, then, between a state voting for Republicans and receiving more in federal spending than its residents pay to the federal government in taxes (the rust belt and Texas being notable exceptions). In essence, those in blue states are subsidizing those in red states. Both red and blue states appear to be acting politically in opposition to their economic interests. Blue states are voting for candidates who are likely to continue the policies of red state subsidization while red states are voting for candidates who profess a desire to reduce federal spending (and presumably red state subsidization).

One cautionary note on this is that the last time I tried to look into this subject, I was assured that there’s no really methodologically rigorous way of assessing the issue and was cautioned away from overreliance on the very same 2005 Tax Foundation study that’s the basis for this map.

My larger concern, however, is with the “ecological fallacy” of attributing the quality of whole states to specific individuals. There are millions of people in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, etc. who voted for Barack Obama. Those people are primarily lower income people. If we slashed federal spending on Medicaid, Title I education assistance, food stamps, etc. and used the savings to cut taxes on high income individuals then “Alabama” and “Arkansas” would suffer while “New Jersey” and “Connecticut” would gain. But at an individual level, low-income people would lose and high-income people would win. So there’s nothing really irrational about a well-to-do businessman in Mobile voting for tax cuts, or a poor person in Newark voting for anti-poverty programs.

Rep Joseph Cao (R-LA)

Dave Weigel recounts Rep Joseph Cao’s dialogue with Kim Hasney, a photographer from Jefferson County who used to be a Cao enthusiast but is upset by his relatively moderate voting record:

“He had fundraisers, he had meetings, all in the suburbs — the white suburbs,” said Hasney, who attended one of those events. “He had nothing in the district. We got him elected. Then, he goes and says ‘but I have to represent my district,’ which is all liberal, giveaway, spread-the-wealth, welfare, black. We thought he would try to change the demographics of that district by supporting things that were not giveaway things. You know, supporting things that would get them out of the ghetto.”

Hasney made it clear that she opposed Cao’s votes because she thought they were the wrong way to lift poor blacks in New Orleans out of poverty. “I’m not just talking about black people,” she said. “The Vietnamese people flourish in that area because they’re workers.”

Cao, she said, should have focused on free market solutions that could help other residents lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

“I thought that was what he was going to do,” she said. “As a conservative Republican, bring a work ethic, bring a non-welfare ethic.”

We’re a long way from the days of “The Future is Cao.”

The other day I said the political economy arguments for breaking up large banks confused me since if big banks have too much clout to regulate properly, then surely they have too much clout to break up. Bond Girl is back with a fairly convincing response:

If we buy into the idea that all we need is better regulation, or that better regulation is the only politically feasible solution and we should take what we can get, we will still be left with banks that are effectively self-regulated in practice. What the banks cannot directly procure they will find a way to game.

I think the biggest obstacle to breaking up the banks, on the other hand, is the fear that this will be a destabilizing event. What happened to the stock market when the president, stung by the Democrats’ loss in Massachusetts, announced the (rather toothless) Volcker Rule? If one talks seriously about radically changing the structure of the financial sector in this country as opposed to making incremental changes, people immediately start panicking over the possibility of revisiting the financial crisis. These fears are not entirely misplaced, and that is what makes them politically useful. (“We just navigated our way through the financial crisis and its fallout, so let’s not do anything stupid and rock the boat.”) The ironic thing about this situation, however, is that our fear of instability in the short-term is leading us to make decisions that only further destabilize our system in the medium term. I don’t know, maybe that is not all that ironic. Maybe we’ve all simply internalized the bank executives’ time horizon.

At any rate, why is it more difficult politically to regulate banks effectively rather than break them up? Breaking up the banks requires a political movement – get it done and move on. Effectively regulating too big to fail institutions, at best, requires a long-term political commitment and constant supervision, not just of the banks but of their supervisors, who largely depend upon the banks for information. That’s what seems overly optimistic to me.

In other words, probably easier to just pull the band-aid off once than try to grind the issue out over time.

But before you jump off a bridge in a fit of depressed fatalism, I do want to note that financial regulation shouldn’t be seen as a binary issue wherein we either create a system that “works” or one that “doesn’t work.” A system in which major financial crises occur every 25 years is a lot better than a system in which we get one every 10 years, even if both are accurately described as systems that a prone to crises because big banks are able to game the rules.

On the other hand, to make yourself even more depressed it is worth pointing out that probably the biggest source of bank political clout isn’t size or even money alone, but the combination of money with political and social prestige. And at this point, I’m genuinely puzzled as to what could break that prestige. You’d think a catastrophic series of screwups that lead to a severe worldwide recession would do the trick, but instead it seems to have enhanced the prestige of those bankers who managed to screw up less than their colleagues. It’s really terrifying.