The future of energy and climate legislation is once again uncertain in the Senate -- inertia seems to be the legislation's perpetual state of being at this point -- and the possibility of a compromise that would pass energy-standard regulations but not cap-and-trade is looming. One such compromise is the less-than-thrilling package Sen. Dick Lugar has cooked up. As David Leonhardt just noted in The New York Times, the standard argument against this kind of compromise is that it allows the legislature to duck meaningful reform. Many argue that failure is even preferable, as it could inspire a renewed push for something more ambitious. Leonhardt ends his column doubting this failure-as-an-impetus-to-try-harder theory:
Yet if the Lugar approach were the only one that could pass, should we be so confident that it would put off further action? It's not clear to me how another failure on energy policy will somehow make success more likely in the future.
It's not clear to me, either. An example is health-care reform. We've tried to reform the health-care system before, most recently at the start of the Clinton administration. And though the Clinton reform was more ambitious than what Obama recently signed into law, it was still a compromise from the left's preferred solution of single-payer. As Ezra Klein noted several times over, that failure didn't lead to a regrouping or renewed push; it just drove the issue underground for 15-odd years, while the system continued to get worse. And what finally did pass wasn't a reaction to a dramatic defeat; it was a decade-long grind of political spadework, negotiations, and concessions. Previous attempts to reform health care tell the same story -- failure breeds failure, and success breeds success. The failure-then-redemption narrative is attractive, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that's how legislative reform actually works.
Let me repeat a recent point by Paul Waldman and say it's basically a structural fact of reality that successfully passing progressive reform is harder than opposing it. Inertia, status quo bias, and a consensus-based legislative system strewn with veto points always work against you, never for you. And going back to Klein, it's always easier to build upon a structure that's already in place than to construct it from scratch. This seems to be the lot of liberals and progressives, for better and for worse. It's galling to be forever accepting half and quarter loaves, but if you don't first get your foot in the door, the most probable outcome seems to be nothing at all.
-- Jeff Spross
