When Is Voting Against Party Acceptable?
By Mark Schmitt is, as usual, dead right about David Sirota’s call to excommunicate pro-Cafta Democrats:
As for the specific case of CAFTA, I agree with Sirota that the right vote was No, for reasons that Rep. Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the trade subcommittee, explained in the Financial Times.. There are also particular objections to the process by which this treaty was brought up, and it would have been tactically advantageous to deny the Republicans 14 votes so that they would have to twist 14 more arms of their own to fulfill the White House’s categorical demand that it pass the legislation.
But trade has never been a party-line issue for Democrats and is unlikely to be any time soon. The dispute is not nearly as bitter as it was in the NAFTA era, but even then, no one argued that pro-NAFTA legislators (notably my old boss, Senator Bradley) should be drummed out of the party or “held accountable.” Even in the case of CAFTA, some Democratic representatives may conclude that for their constituents the treaty as written is preferable to no treaty at all. They may represent major employers that would benefit from CAFTA, or a key port, or a significant ethnic constituency, e.g. Dominicans.
They may be wrong, you may disagree with them or believe that in the same position, you would have made a different choice. But in a pluralist democracy, which is not a parliamentary system, it is only their constituents who are entitled to hold them “accountable” for their choices.
Yes. And what’s doubly frustrating is that I do think Sirota’s right that a vote for the bankruptcy bill was unacceptable, and I think his attempt to conflate the two votes undermines the latter point. Basically, for party discipline to be an ironclad requirement, I think a few conditions have to be met. The bankruptcy bill was a bill on which 1)the issue was potentially salient, 2)the Democratic position was popular, 3)the bill was absolutely indefensible on the merits, 4)the policy impact will be significant, and 5)the bill represents a core Democratic value. Even if you stipulate 1 and 2 for Cafta–which is far from clear–as Schmitt argues Sirota’s case is dubious on #3 and #5, and I think it fails spectacularly on #4. The thing about Cafta is that its impact is essentially trivial; it’s just not an issue on which deviation from party discipline should be unacceptable. (This also represents another problem, which is the tendency of some progressives to project all kinds of larger issues onto trade pacts, which both greatly overstate their importance and leads to muddled thinking about how to actually solve the underlying problems people associate with trade agreements.)