How do the Catfood Commissioners know which kinds of spending to target and which to leave alone? Meet the U.S. permanent government

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Why are the recommendations of the "deficit-reduction commission" stacked toward an assault on the popular government programs labeled "entitlements"? Because of who was appointed to the commission. And why were those particular people appointed to the commission?

by Ken

The other day WaPo wag Al Kamen reported this news on the executive-appointment front in his "In the Loop" column:

Republicans get a target

As expected, the White House, after nearly two years, has finally announced a pick for director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The choice is Andrew Traver, a career employee who is now special agent in charge of the ATF's Chicago field office.

As we mentioned back on Aug. 4, if approved, Traver would be the first-ever Senate-confirmed ATF director. The position had been filled (at the Treasury Department and more recently at Justice) without Senate input. Since the job became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Hard to imagine Traver will be approved by the new Senate. While they're at it, maybe the folks at the White House will finally nominate someone to be solicitor general, name another to run Justice's Office of Legal Counsel and find a qualified nominee for the tax operation.

Did you get that? "Since the job [of ATF director] became Senate-confirmable in 2006, it seems, no one has made it past the watchful eyes of the gun lobby.

Now the NRA isn't a natural part of our permanent government. To give it its due, through sheer organizational single-mindedness and ruthlessness, it bullied its way into its position of power, from which it has an effective veto over any policy matter that in any way impinges on its guncentric agenda. And the permanent government for once yielded. The power of the NRA in its domain is pretty much unchallenged -- a wise decision for those who wish to control the levers of power, considering how well the NRA knows how and is willing and eager to, um, participate in the electoral process. (A quick show of hands, please, among those out there who hold elective office that requires them to face reelection or are contemplating running for same: How would you like to run your campaign against the full political force of the NRA?)

And who exactly makes up this permanent government of which I speak? It's people inside government, yes, but even more importantly people outside government, really important (read "rich") and well-connected (read "rich") people. It's not "rich people" as a class; there are probably a fair number of rich people who, as long as they can hold onto what they've got, aren't much interested in running the country. And there are rich people, as we keep seeing when people like Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina whom no amount of money will put into office -- though their mistake may simply be in trying to be office-holding members of the PG.

This won't define the PG for you, but we get some useful images when journalist-turned-cabinet-minister-turned-Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) announces to the cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), and to his principal private secretary, Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds): "I know exactly who reads the papers."



Of course we don't usually see the PG at work. Its handiwork is usually most visible in the actions (or non-actions) of the people who do its bidding. If, for example, you look at the CVs of virtually all the Catfood Commission members, you'll see the network of ties that make their conclusions on deficit reduction so drearily predictable. Never mind that the "economic realities" they and their cronies keep warning us we have to confront if we wish to be taken seriously are challenged up and down the line by economists who aren't being paid off by the PG masters of the "deficit hawks." Or that when they whimper solemnly that they've explored every imaginable budget area for budget savings, they're just kidding. They have homed in on the areas their PG masters wish them to target, and will take away not so much as a thin dime from the areas their PG masters wish left undisturbed. (See Howie's post yesterday, "The Catfood Commission's Dark Vision For Our Country Isn't Inevitable.")

Now, not everyone in government. What we need to recognize is the ferocious power the PG exerts on officeholders to conform. A lot of people have invested an awful lot of money in arranging a status quo that suits them well enough, thank you, and while they always have helpful ideas for how that status quo can be (according to their perspective) "improved," none of those ideas would constitute what we would call "reform." More like de-form. You know, the sort of thing the Bush regime and the get-rich-quick Republican Congress specialized in, and that the new Republican House (and, coming in January 2013, the new Republican Senate) is poised to be offering its cash customers.

The rewards for "going along" range from generous to profligate. As we're so often made aware, the first consideration of most elected officials is getting reelected, and as the cost of getting elected has risen so enormously, our elected officials are in virtually perpetual fund-raising mode. Government service also attracts large numbers of the kind of people who are simply drawn to venues where large quantities of money are moved around. You know, the kind who specialize in ways of moving chunks of that money into their personal pockets. The PG both controls vast sources of campaign and just plain bribe-payment cash, and also often has the power to turn off the money tap for candidates it wishes to disadvantage.

In addition, lately I've been eavesdropping on chatter among people who've seen the inside of government and report that one of the most powerful engines for status-quo maintenance is the incredible inertial pull of the PG minions who fill the zillions of staff positions at all levels of government, certainly including the members of both houses of Congress. It's not necessarily a matter of being "conservative" in the political sense, but of being conservative in the literal sense of fighting tenaciously to preserve the system they've signed on to, in which they're making, or have made, their way.

Some of them, perhaps even many of them, may have made their way into government service for reasons as ringingly idealistic as DWT readers could hope for. However, it takes a really special kind of person to withstand the pounding the system inflicts on people who don't grasp the wisdom of "getting along." For both elected officials and staffers, it's a carrot-and-stick deal: rewards stretching on into the foreseeable future, even if unfavorably wafting electoral circumstances should thrust you out of office. There are, after all, all those lobbying positions, not to mention all those appointive positions inside and outside government where a "good soldier" can land on his feet. In case there are any electeds who somehow don't get the message, they're surrounded by all those staff grunts to keep trying to drum it into them.

As Howie has pointed out to me often since he's been working actively with candidates, the stifling effect of status-quo-driven staff sets in earlier and earlier in the electoral process. One traditional transformation point comes when an insurgent candidate is actually elected. Once that magic "-elect" is added to the office title, the sharks move in. Experienced staffers who know now that there are actual jobs to be had with, say, Congressman-elect X. And overnight, a candidate who was desperate for any attention he could get becomes unavailable except through his "people." We might also consider the kind of people who by basic personality type are drawn to being somebody important's people.

And more and more the process starts earlier than that. Candidates who want to be taken "seriously" -- and it's pretty hard to raise "serious" cash if you're not taken "seriously" -- are under pressure to hire, well, "serious" campaign staff and campaign consultants. It's gotten worse than that. Howie is going to be reporting some pretty stomach-turning revelations about a seemingly seamless integration of the Democratic congressional campaign apparatus with consultants whom candidates are, shall we say, urgently advised to use.

Whereas the price for not going along is, well, you're on your own. If you can keep getting reelected, more power to you, but not in the sense of any real power -- there are plenty of institutional ways to decrease the chances that a troublemaker doesn't amass much real power. And reelection isn't going to be a lead-pipe cinch. A chap like Russ Feingold, about as uncontrolled as a present-day U.S. senator can be, had precious few chits to call in from the PG, and against a deep-pocketed candidate whom no sane person would want on the same planet with our government, in an election climate where so many voters were determined to show that the human brain can be good for nothing more than filling intracranial space, he was hung out to dry. I suspect few tears were shed by either "the people who run the country" or "the people who own the country."

And that's all without even mentioning the vast apparatus that has grown up to support the PG, the hordes of media and other hangers-on whose livelihood waxes and wanes in exactly the same way as those of elected officeholders and staff people, the people who fill out that oh-so-harmonious, largely nonpartisan community of interest that Digby has so elegantly and usefully dubbed the Village -- that misty world where people like David Broder are (yes!) take seriously. There's no practical limit to the rewards for getting along with the Village agenda, and a painful price to be paid for not doing so. Resistance, one might almost say, is futile.

Actually, I find myself suddenly thinking a lot about Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minster, in which a well-meaning but easily befuddled by reality journalist becomes, first, minister of administrative affairs and then, by an astonishing series of "Party Games," prime minister.

In this clip from "Party Games," the extended episode of Yes, Minister that sets the stage for Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Arnold Robinson (John Nettleton), the recently retired cabinet secretary (the highest-ranking official of the official British permanent government, more or less the civil-service counterpart to the prime minister), who regretfully is unable to talk about his new work with the Campaign for the Freedom of Information, chats with his successor, Sir Humphrey, his old Oxford chum, who previously "served" Jim Hacker as the Ministry of Administrative Affairs' permanent secretary, about the candidates to be the next prime minister. As they describe the characteristics of their ideal PM (someone who's "malleable" and can be "guided" in the direction of not doing much of anything), there comes a magical moment when the same preposterous idea occurs to them more or less simultaneously.

The permanent government picks a PM

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