A Mixed Week for Majority Rule
On the Senate, "metropolitan statistical areas," Moby Dick, and more.
Things briefly looked good for filibuster reform this week. There was some movement in favor of the “talking filibuster,” which requires senators who block a final vote on legislation to actually hold the Senate floor while they do so. (They don’t have to do that under the current rules.) Joe Manchin even seemed in favor of it, saying earlier this month that there should be “a little bit of pain” while filibustering. Mitch McConnell, sensing danger, again started threatening to beset all manner of ills upon the Senate if the noble filibuster should ever be imperiled by its Democratic foes.
“This is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon,” McConnell warned, “to proceed with a garden-variety floor speech, to dispense with the reading of lengthy legislative text, to schedule committee business, to move even noncontroversial nominees at anything besides a snail’s pace.” I’m not sure if he realized he was making the case for changing Senate rules instead of defending them. From my article on Tuesday:
The fact that major voting rights reforms now sit squarely in the crosshairs of a GOP filibuster only reveals the emptiness of McConnell’s gravest warning. “As soon as Republicans wound up back in the saddle,” he cautioned, “we wouldn’t just erase every liberal change that hurt the country. We’d strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side.” Absent the passage of measures that will substantially shore up the right to vote against the GOP’s constant and ongoing voter suppression efforts, that’s what the future portends anyway.
Besides, McConnell’s warning that he’ll “strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side” when Republicans retake the chamber may prompt some conservatives to ask why they weren’t doing that in the first place. Donald Trump certainly has. The biggest hurdle that Republicans face at the moment has nothing to do with arcane Senate procedures. Their right-wing wish list is far more hindered by the lack of public support for their proposals, which in turn puts future Republican majorities at risk if they are passed. How else does the Affordable Care Act remain the law of the land after a decade of Republican threats to repeal it?
Later that night, after the article went live, President Biden said in an interview that he supported the push for a talking filibuster. Things started looking up! Then Manchin pivoted hard on Wednesday against any potential changes that would actually defang the filibuster. He even ruled out making an exception to pass H.R. 1, the Democrats’ signature election-reform bill.
The White House’s growing appetite for filibuster reform—and for passing legislation in general—may eventually alter this dynamic, as could continued Republican intransigence. But Manchin sounds pretty firm here. The best outcome for everyone involved would be if Democrats squeeze enough out of the 117th Congress to pick up two or more Senate seats in the 2022 midterms, then get rid of the filibuster in the 118th Congress without the votes of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Or they could, y’know, finally make the District of Columbia into a state.
I also wrote on Thursday about the recent surge in GOP-backed proposals in state legislatures that would undermine the independence of state courts. Democrats no longer really talk about court-packing, partly because the Supreme Court is fairly quiet this term, and partly because there are nowhere near enough votes for it in Congress at the moment. (I’m still against it, for the record.) If the issue ever resurfaces, however, court-packing fans on the left can take heart that Republicans seem to have forfeited the institutionalist case against it.
When is a city not a city? Whenever the Office of Management and Budget says so, apparently. The agency is currently circulating a proposal to raise the threshold for what counts as a “metropolitan statistical area” for federal statistics. Since 1950, it required a minimum of 50,000 residents. That could change to a minimum of 100,000 residents if or when the proposed change is set to take place in 2023.
This would be fairly trivial if the decision didn’t have fiscal and economic consequences for the cities—sorry, “metropolitan statistical areas”—that meet the current threshold, but not the revised one. Roughly one-third of the current MSAs fall into that category. From the Associated Press:
Several housing, transportation, and Medicare reimbursement programs are tied to communities being metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs, so the designation change concerns some city officials.
In Corvallis, Oregon, the state designates certain funding sources to metropolitan statistical areas and any change to the city’s status could create a ripple effect, particularly when it comes to transportation funding, said Patrick Rollens, a spokesman for the city that is home to Oregon State University.
“I won’t lie. We would be dismayed to see our MSA designation go away. We aren’t a suburb of any other, larger city in the area, so this is very much part of our community’s identity,” Rollens said in an email. “Losing the designation would also have potentially adverse impacts on recruitment for local businesses, as well as Oregon State University.”
The AP also cites officials from smaller localities who aren’t pleased with the proposed change either, noting that it could redirect resources meant for rural communities towards the newly “micropolitan” ones instead. (That’s OMB’s word for sub-metropolitan statistical areas, not mine.) According to the Federal Register, OMB formally submitted the proposed change on January 19, 2021—Donald Trump’s last full day in office.
A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers, including Arizona’s two Democratic senators, sent a letter to the acting OMB director last week urging him to reject the proposal. Other legislators have also chimed in against the change. In theory, any of these representatives or senators could introduce a bill to prevent this. Based on the geographic breakdown below, there could well be enough votes to pass it. But Congress, as I’ve often noted before, has allowed its lawmaking muscles to atrophy over the past few decades, and no such bill has yet been introduced.
To see if your community could be downgraded, you can download an official PDF map here. There’s no clear pattern among the 144 MSAs that would be affected. But it’s hard to not notice how many of them are in battleground states: four in Arizona, five in Wisconsin, six each in Georgia and Michigan, and eight in Pennsylvania. If residents in those communities raise enough hell about this, they just might get the Biden administration to listen.
I gave up on reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in high school after about seventeen chapters. It’s perhaps the best-known revenge narrative in Western literature as well as a classic American novel. It is also not an easy or pleasant read. Fortunately, I watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid, and they quote from it in multiple films, so I was still able to ace the test about it.
If I ever get around to finishing the book, I will be cheering for the whale. Humans mercilessly hunted sperm whales like Moby Dick throughout the industrial age for lantern fuel and perfume additives. Fortunately, we now know much more about cetacean intelligence and their ability to communicate with one another. Some researchers have even referred to “whale culture” to describe how the seafaring giants adapt to changing circumstances, then pass those lessons on to their kin.
A new study, drawing upon logbooks written by 19th-century whalers, suggests that groups of sperm whales in the Pacific Ocean learned from their first encounters with whaling ships—and then warned other whales not to repeat their mistakes. At first, whales reacted to the ships as they would against orcas: by creating defensive circles with their tails facing the predator. But this only made it easier to be harpooned, so they changed tactics. From The Guardian:
Sperm whales are highly socialized animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilineal, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.
The hunters themselves realized the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’ says Whitehead.
Humans, thankfully, have virtually abandoned whaling in recent decades. Though we no longer slaughter them on an industrial scale, however, our noisy shipping traffic makes it harder and harder for whales to communicate with each another. The COVID-19 pandemic—and the associated plunge in global trade—gave them a brief respite from the cacophony. But as we begin to end our tragic isolation, these creatures will plunge further into theirs.
Lightning round: Private equity firms are gobbling up mobile home parks. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declared war on Garamond. Dungeons & Dragons is booming. So are model trains. Viet Dinh is the most powerful lawyer in America. Wikipedia is going commercial. France is finally returning its only Gustav Klimt. Cruise ships are floating in mid-air off the British coast.
This is the first issue of the newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. What did you enjoy? What could you do without? Please feel free to send me your feedback at matt@tnr.com. See you again next week!