The institutions of Capitol Hill are falling fast. First they ended the page program. Now comes word that the Hawk n’ Dove is closing in October. Don’t be fooled, either: even though the Hawk will remain a bar location, it’s getting a 100% remodeling by it’s new owners.

Honestly, I don’t love the Hawk. The barroom is overrated, and the entire indoor lunch area smells like a urinal. The private room is great for a small gathering and the waitstaff is definitely friendly, but even my favorite thing on the menu (Park City chicken sandwich) doesn’t hold a candle to a randomly picked sandwich at Mr. Henry’s just down the street.

No, the reason I’ll miss the Hawk are purely Burkean. This was an institution both constitutive and reflective of Capitol Hill. It’s charmingly grimey in the barroom. You’re just as likely to see someone in a $1000 suit as you are someone who looks seriously down on their luck. Everyone talks politics, but even the politicos don’t talk it seriously. No one is going to do you any favors, but the waitstaff is genuinely friendly.

The grandeur of the place is only found in your imagination; seemingly everything has happened there, but anytime you go there, nothing does. The creative destruction of capitalism requires that places like the Hawk eventually move on. I’ll miss it more than I should. Continue reading →

Once again, we seem to be caught in a short-term/long-term problem. I written about this here and here, although that was more in the purely political/democratic sense of the problem.

The problem now is more purely economic (although political/democratic issues still pervade). The short term problem is that we may be sliding back into a recession (or worse). The long-term problem is that much of the western world has massive sovereign debt issues. More after the jump… Continue reading →

You could fill the hayloft right now, as they say, with all the talk about Representative Michelle Bachmann’s (R-MN) candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. And yet I haven’t seen a single discussion of what, from a political science perspective, is perhaps the most unusual aspect of Ms. Bachmann’s campaign:

She is a sitting Member of the House of Representatives.

It is hard to overstate how rare it is for major candidates for the Presidency to be Representatives. Only one person — James Garfield — has ever gone from the People’s House to the White House.*** One other sitting Representative has won electoral votes, Speaker of the House Henry Clay in 1824. Since the onset of the modern party convention system in 1832, no major political party has nominated a sitting Representative (save the Republican nomination of Garfield in 1880) for the presidency. Representative John Anderson (R-IL) ran as an independent candidate in 1980, and won 7% of the national popular vote. Only a handful of other sitting Members — Dick Gephardt and Jack Kemp in 1988, Mo Udall in 1976 — even come to mind as serious contenders for major party nominations.

[UPDATE: Reports indicate that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) may be seriously considering running. He’d be an instant serious contender.]

This is not to say that having previously served in the House is a detriment for a Presidential candidate. To the contrary, 19 Presidents and 33 major nominees had, prior to their candidacy, been Members of the House.

Why is this? There’s no definitive answer, but here are four explanations with probable marginal effects: Continue reading →

Holy cow: the joint leadership of the House of Representatives just ended the Page Program. It’s been around since the 1820’s. Full text of the Boehner/Pelosi letter after the jump.

Continue reading →

I’m one of the few people standing on Capitol Hill who has not — at least as of yet — been blamed for the S&P ratings downgrade of U.S. Treasuries and related bonds. And I may be the only person on Capitol Hill who isn’t confident that they somehow know what caused the downgrade and, more importantly, who to blame. Seemingly every politician, staffer, pundit, blogger, and crazy uncle in the whole country seems to know the answer to those two questions.

I have but just three points. Continue reading →