Three Grand Bargain Proposals
Good policy, good politics, and who knows, they might even get the votes to pass
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-WV), the pivotal vote in the Senate, is a big fan of bipartisanship. He’s working on a bipartisan infrastructure bill, killed H.R. 1 because it was not bipartisan enough1, and refuses to abolish the filibuster in the name of bipartisanship.
Unfortunately, bipartisan compromise is in short supply these days. Most major legislation — Obamacare, the 2017 Trump tax cut, the American Rescue Plan, etc. — passes on party lines. Nonetheless, there have been some notable bipartisan efforts in recent years — the Gang of Eight immigration bill, the First Step Act, the 2018 Massachusetts grand bargain. Some have been successes; others failures.
Below are three proposals for bipartisan compromises that I believe would be both politically popular and good policy.
More cops, more accountability
After decades of decline, violent crime is on the rise again in America. According to The Guardian, the country “saw estimated 4,000 extra murders in 2020 amid [a] surge in daily gun violence,” and WBUR reports that some large cities saw the homicide rate increase by 30% in 2020. Hate crimes against Asian Americans are up by almost 150%. The exact causes of the surge are unclear (as are the causes of the drop in crime starting in the 1990s) but it is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed. At the same time, protests after the murder of George Floyd have drawn attention to the flaws in the criminal justice system and the need for reform.
There is ample research showing that having more cops on the street reduces crime. The mechanism is fairly obvious — no one is going to shoplift or mug someone if there’s a cop walking down the block. And voters support hiring more cops and prefer maintaining or increasing current funding levels to defunding the police.
At the same time, voters recognize that policing reforms are needed to curb abuses. I think the general formula articulated by Matt Yglesias of less job security (making it easier to fire bad cops) and higher pay (to attract higher-quality candidates) is correct here, and voters seem to support several proposed reforms2.
Specifically, I’d like to pair hiring more cops with ending qualified immunity, a legal doctrine grants police officers immunity from civil lawsuits unless the plaintiff can show that the right they claim was violated was “clearly established” by a previous, successful lawsuit holding that a police officer violated that right. This is a Catch-22 that makes it very difficult to sue police officers for misconduct. Scrapping qualified immunity would make it easier to hold bad cops accountable, and a large majority of the public favors doing so, with support remaining strong even when voters are presented with a counterargument in favor of qualified immunity3:
Let’s kill two birds with one stone by reducing both crime and police abuses.
An Australian immigration compromise
Immigration is a good thing. It boosts the economy, keeps programs like Social Security solvent, and doesn’t reduce wages. The Washington Post reports that:
Without robust immigration, the United States would look more like Japan, Germany and Italy, where births and the influx of newcomers have been unable to keep pace with the graying of the population, placing burdens on social services and the labor force. A Pew Research Center analysis showed that over half of the U.S. population increase between 1965 and 2015 was due to immigration, which alone added about 72 million people. With no immigration in the next half-century, growth in the United States would nearly flatten.
It is in the national interest to increase legal immigration, in order to keep our country strong at home and competitive globally. But many voters worry about the downsides of immigration — e.g., unwelcome social changes such as intolerance of gay people or increased crime (whether based in fact or not). Therefore, people support legal immigration over the illegal sort, wanting to control who comes into their country and on what terms.
The bipartisan “Gang of Eight” immigration reform proposal from 2013 is a good outline of a compromise on immigration. The bill would have created a pathway to citizenship, new visa categories, and a points-based system for high-skilled immigration in exchange for hiring up to 40,000 more Border Patrol agents and beefing up border security.
GOP pollster Frank Luntz recently put forward a similar compromise, finding 60% support for the following proposal:
“Complete the building of a physical barrier between the U.S and Mexico to ensure border security, and pass the DREAM Act, which will give the children of undocumented workers the chance to earn citizenship over time.”
I propose that the US adopt an Australia-style immigration system as detailed in this video by The Economist:
The gist of it is increased and streamlined opportunities for legal immigration in exchange for strong border security. Public opinion gives reason to believe that Americans would approve of such a system — Americans overwhelmingly believe that legal immigration is a good thing for the country but also favor hiring more Border Patrol agents, according to polling from Gallup:
Voters have complex views on immigration, and there is no clear consensus in public opinion on the broad question of whether immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept at current levels, but the strong support for the Gang of Eight proposals and the Luntz compromise — as well as the general support for legal immigration and stronger border security — indicates that an Australia-style immigration system would likely command broad support.
The Joe Manchin III Voting Rights Act of 2021
I was going to propose a renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a ban on partisan gerrymandering in exchange for a national voter ID law but it looks like Joe Manchin beat me to the punch. On Wednesday the senator from West Virginia released a memo outlining his proposed voting rights bill. From the Manchin memo:
While I’ve argued in the past for much more sweeping voting reforms, my biggest priorities are reauthorization of the VRA (check) and ending partisan gerrymandering (check). Everything else in H.R.1 is nice to have but doesn’t address the real problem in our democracy — that one party can win despite representing a minority of voters.
Reauthorization of the VRA would bring back what has historically been one of the most powerful tools for combatting voter suppression. Banning partisan gerrymandering would ensure that voters choose their representatives, not the other way around — I have a post coming soon on how to make this part of the Manchin proposal even better — and voters overwhelmingly support switching to independent redistricting commissions, having passed referendums to do so in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Utah, and Virginia.
I’m not a huge fan of voter ID on principle — voter fraud just isn’t a major problem in the United States and many of the politicians promoting voter ID laws have done so in less than good faith. Fortunately, a recent study has found that while ID laws don’t prevent (nearly nonexistent) fraud, they also don’t decrease turnout. Understandably voters want peace of mind when it comes to election security; hence voter ID having broad support in the court of public opinion:
My principal issue with voter ID laws is when they are written to be highly restrictive — requiring only certain forms of ID that can be difficult to obtain or chosen for partisan reasons (e.g., Texas allowing a concealed carry permit for voting but not a student ID). My ideal solution would be establishing a proper national ID system to ensure that no eligible voter is left without an ID since we seem to de facto going in that direction with REAL ID, but the Manchin proposal includes “allowable alternatives” such as a utility bill, so I’m not worried that this national voter ID law would be excessively restrictive4.
But don’t take my word for how great the Manchin package is — even Stacey Abrams supports it!
Back to reality
The actual legislative prospects of these three proposals vary from grim to slim:
Bigger and better policing: Police unions often resist even mild reforms, and the Democrats who dominate the cities where most policing happens are increasingly hostile to the idea of spending more on police departments in the wake of the defund movement.
Australia-style immigration deal: likely DOA because of political polarization — the Republicans lost interest in immigration reform after then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary in 2014; the Democrats don’t have the votes to go it alone and aren’t as interested in beefing up border security anymore.
Manchin’s voting proposal: Naturally, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) came out against the compromise within a day, all but ensuring that it will face a Republican filibuster.
I’m most hopeful about the prospects of the policing compromise and the new voting bill — Eric Adams has argued that he worked to reform the NYPD from within as a cop while opposing defunding the police and seems poised to become the next mayor of New York, and I’m very cautiously optimistic that Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) can get around the filibuster and find the votes to pass the former’s bill.
Otto von Bismarck said that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best” — and that means at least trying to find compromise and common ground. Hopefully, these proposals are a starting point.
Manchin instead supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which he believes can get bipartisan support in the Senate. Previous VRA reauthorizations passed on a bipartisan basis, but I’m skeptical that the John Lewis bill can get 10 GOP votes.
I say that voters “seem” to support these reforms because the way the questions were phrased could have caused the results to suffer from acquiescence bias — basically, people blindly saying that they support things that sound good on paper. This poll was also done during the height of the George Floyd protests when support for police reform was at a high, so these results might overstate current support for reform somewhat.
Having respondents choose between two options instead of asking “do you approve/disapprove of X?” reduces acquiescence bias and therefore leads to more accurate results (this method is often used by the left-leaning pollster Data for Progress). Adding explicitly partisan labels/framings can also help because in the real world people hear arguments about a policy issue in a partisan context.
The Manchin proposal’s national voter ID law might even preempt more restrictive state laws.