Weekend Update, February 27

Weekend Update, February 27

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

(Bill O'Leary-Pool/Getty Images)

Something to keep your eye on in March and April will be a legacy of Obama-era crisis legislation, wherein when Congress passes deficit-increasing bills, automatic provider-side Medicare cuts are theoretically triggered.

This got ignored a bunch of times under Trump (and even a few times under Obama), with big bipartisan majorities agreeing to waive the cuts. But in theory, Republicans could refuse to vote for waivers after Democrats pass a COVID-19 relief bill, and the waiver is subject to filibuster. I feel pretty confident (call it 90%) that Republicans will just agree to waive the cuts. But if they don’t, that creates a high-pressure situation to change filibuster rules.

Who wants free college?

Something I often hear from younger academics who are frustrated with the political conversation around campus speech stuff is that the “real threat” to free speech and academic freedom comes from right-wing state legislatures. A great example of this trend is Tennessee Republicans moving to ban athletes from engaging in acts of protest — though the good news is that what they are doing is likely unconstitutional.

But it reminds me that I think the tension between academics’ politics and interests and the views of the median state legislator is probably underrated in the free college conversation. After all, one consequence of the neoliberal turn within higher education financing has been to partially liberate public university faculty from state legislatures, who are no longer really footing the bill. The key questions become: Do the students (now conceived of as paying customers) want to keep coming, and are the donors happy?

And whatever else you may say about the leftward tilt of American academia, it’s been a successful business model at the high end, with robust demand from foreign students and plenty of donor money pouring in. If you changed to a model where state legislatures and the U.S. Congress finance 100% of the cost of undergraduate education, then the content of that education will have to reflect elected officials’ ideas of what’s worth doing, which will often be quite different from the ideas of faculty members.

Rule by parliamentarian

It’s wrong to think that Democrats won’t be doing the $15/hour minimum wage purely because of the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling. A key part of the backstory is that Senator Manchin (publicly) and others (privately) think the Raise the Wage Act goes to too high a number too quickly.

But the underlying process we are now working with is absurd.

The basic idea that a bill should pass a legislature if it has majority support, but not otherwise, shouldn’t be seen as some kind of radical idea. The Raise the Wage Act ($15/hr pretty quickly) doesn't have majority support, but raising the minimum wage does — we should legislate based on where we can find simple majorities, not by playing chicken with the Senate parliamentarian.

Two good reads on housing

Jerusalem Demsas is a talented young reporter carving out an interest in the housing beat over at Vox, and I want to recommend two of her recent articles — one is about the prospects of using federal civil rights law to sue exclusionary suburbs, and the other is on polling zoning reform, where an argument that centers economic growth outperforms one that centers racial justice.

This is not shocking to readers of our own Marc Novicoff’s work but it’s fascinating to see the same basic dynamic apply in a very different context from the one he was looking at.