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A few points concerning lawmaking in an era when few non-appropriation measures become law:
The legislative branch of government having ceded the overwhelming bulk of their authority to the administrative state, legislating has become largely a sideshow.
The current Democratic field includes 15 current or former members of Congress. Other than Biden, none of them are running on a legislative record in anything but a positional sense.
Lawmaking today amounts to little more than a virtue signal on particular issues, or a slight redirection of the approach used by administrative state regulators and bureaucrats.
Having spent several years on Capitol Hill, everyone with a brain there knows why Senators or Congressmen propose legislation, and it's not because they expect it to pass unless by accident.
It is almost always not because they expect it to pass. It is because they're making a point... a point that they hope results in other actors (agencies, regulators, institutions, private industry) changing behavior without the legislation ever coming close to being law.
Some of the most significant lawmaking steps undertaken during Obama's tenure involved the arbitrary funding and delay of aspects of Obamacare, and a single advisory letter concerning Title IX. These had just as much impact as law.
In this context, legislators become irrelevant as anything other than talking heads. Their TV appearances matter more than legislative endeavors.
Many of the smarter legislators pursue a kind of "soft legislating" - a way to get what you want done without actually putting something into law. Hauling people before committees, proposing things they would hate, rattling the saber...
Both parties do this, constantly.
Both parties do this, constantly.
They do this because it works.
Phil makes a good point here: tax reform united the party in charge of the White House and Congress, and it was still a close thing. Think how much harder it is to move anything that doesn't unite everyone important.
What always surprises me is when smart people without legislative experience don't grok this, at all. They seem to think that the budgets Paul Ryan proposed when he was a back bencher were actually the ones he wanted to pass. That's ridiculous.
Politicians don't operate under any such illusion. Instead, they put down markers. That's what they all do, and with good reason - to fuel their own ambitions, sure, but also to make things move where Congress won't.
So here’s the challenge as a politician: YouTube is doing things that put kids in danger and that have parents, your constituents, angry, frustrated, and calling you looking for a solution.
You don’t want to kill YouTube. YouTube is great. But you do want YouTube to pay attention to these constituents and not ignore them. So you make a public stink about it and threaten and stir things up, and that leads to changes which make your constituents happy.
This is straightforward stuff that is as old as representative politics, and we’re only going to see more of it from both sides in an era of full spectrum woke capitalism.
Remember when Georgia legislators went after the jet fuel tax break enjoyed by Delta because they hated on gun owners? Think that times 💯
Recently, Ted Cruz and AOC united on an effort to ban former lawmakers from lobbying - an issue where serious free speech concerns can be raised. It's much better for politicians to make a pledge not to meet with members turned lobbyists. No law necessary.
More laws are bad. It's better to have things change without them.
Understand this, and you'll begin to understand how lawmaking works in an era when bills do not become law.
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