[quasse]

I've found it hard to find out who was responsible for PLRA, but what I do know is that it seemed to enjoy wide congressional support, received little scrutiny, was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden was one of the only senators who raised concerns about it preventing meritorious lawsuits. [1]

[1] https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-100-issue-2/please-pa...

[Ericson2314]

It's definitely reaks of 90s Clinton triangulation.

[dragonwriter]

It reeks more of Clintonian conservatism; while triangulation was a Clinton strategy, it gets overused to explain Clinton's policy actions recently, perhaps because people have bought in to decades of Republican propaganda labeling Clinton as some kind of Communist, forgetting that he was an active and vociferous conservative democrat, and before being President a leader of the center-right DLC, and that outside of healthcare and culture war issues his positions were a hairs breadth from Republican positions (at least the pre-1994 ones; his own conservatism contributed to a radical rightward shift of the Overton window, including a radical rightward move in the Republican Party.)

[Ericson2314]

Absolutely right. I should put "triangulation" in scare quotes because it's totally ineffective and dishonest as well.

[dragonwriter]

Triangulation is often (and was for Clinton) an effective near term political strategy (it's quite useful as an electoral strategy for a single election, in many cases), but it's a strategy which wins battles by setting your opponent up to win the long term policy war.