Author Archives: Sheila

Revolutionary Fervor

Maybe it’s because we are a country born out of a revolution, but Americans have a decided preference for dramatic change, and little interest in the boring details of our governmental processes.

 

I thought about that aspect of our national character earlier this month, as I listened to a variety of presentations at the annual Howey Political Forum. The focus was on economic and administrative challenges facing Indiana and proposals for meeting those challenges.

 

In a forceful speech, Governor Daniels emphasized his commitment to thoroughgoing change, and he ticked off a number of those he intends to pursue: continuing to close underused BMV license branches, privatizing prisons, consolidating school corporations, turning some state highways into toll roads, and several others. He added that “no one should be surprised” by his determination to enact sweeping changes in Indiana’s government, because he had run a campaign in which he’d promised to do just that.

 

Governor Daniels was absolutely right; he did campaign on a promise of sweeping change. And I suspect that the mantra of change was a very important element in his victory. “It’s time for a change” is a powerful and time-honored theme of American political life. Rather than analyzing what the proposed change will accomplish, and how it will be implemented, Americans have an unquenchable optimism that the new idea will be better than the one it replaced, and the bigger, the better.

 

This is not to speak to the merits of any of the Governor’s proposals. I agree with some, and disagree with others. But it was hard not to hear in his enthusiastic speech some disquieting echoes of former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who was often quoted as saying about city government, “If it isn’t broken, break it. Then fix it.” I guess I just want to be sure that what we are undertaking to fix is really already broken.

 

I also think it is interesting that Republicans and Democrats alike prefer sweeping new measures to the sorts of admittedly boring, incremental improvements that everyone familiar with government thinks we need. During a later panel, Pat Kiely, a former Republican legislator widely respected on both sides of the aisle, talked about one of the enduring frustrations companies encounter when they do business with state government. Most state agencies are organized into regions. This makes sense: why should people in Northwest Indiana, for example, have to come to Indianapolis to deal with a government agency? But as Kiely noted, there is no consistency in either the number of regions or their number. The Indiana Economic Development Commission has six, Workforce Development has eleven, Tourism, six, the State Police, seventeen. There are nine Education Service Centers, four Indiana Housing and Community Development Offices, and three air quality regions. And so on.

 

Perhaps, before we embark on the really revolutionary changes—like turning our prisons and roads over to corporations—we could rationalize the haphazard mess through which we deliver state services. It wouldn’t be as sexy, but it’s already broken.

   

 

 

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Checks and Balances

Every high school government class begins with a lesson on “checks and balances.” We usually think of checks and balances as the three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial—but there are other mechanisms, notably federalism and the Bill of Rights, that were intended to serve the same purpose.

 

Checks and balances grew out of the central preoccupation of those charged with creating a new government: limiting the exercise of government power. That concern was so overwhelming that it had undermined the first attempt to craft a federal system; the Articles of Confederation had so attenuated central power that the resulting government was too weak to be effective.

 

As James Madison memorably explained, dividing government into branches and levels having different responsibilities would set “faction against faction” and force deliberation and compromise. In the American system, the first question to be asked when the state proposes to act is: who decides? Is this a question that government has been empowered to get involved with in the first place? If so, which part of government?

 

With all the posturing and pontificating about “activist” courts, what we sometimes forget is that the judges are the ones who are supposed to say “no” when other parts of government overstep their authority—when the constitutional checks and balances are threatened. And efforts to extend government power beyond what our system permits are everywhere—and growing.

 

Here in Indiana, in the Executive Branch, the Governor has decided that he knows better than local school corporations what sorts of buildings they should build with their own local tax dollars.  In the legislature, Representative Pat Miller has introduced truly surreal legislation that would make criminals of women engaging in “unauthorized reproduction.” Women who want to become pregnant using artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, or similar reproductive techniques would have to apply to the state for a permit, and only married women would be granted such a permit. (I am not making this up! What’s next, forced abortions for unmarried pregnant women?)      

 

At the federal level, we have a Congress that passed the Patriot Act without hearings (or even, in several cases, reading it), a Congress unwilling to check executive authority by insisting on its own prerogatives to declare war, or to meaningfully examine the qualifications of Presidential appointments. Our Imperial Presidency operates in virtual secrecy, crafting energy policy with favored lobbyists, detaining people without due process, and ignoring state laws with which it disagrees.  

 

Ultimately, this is the context within which we must analyze the President’s Supreme Court choices. While public debate has centered on nominees’ positions on abortion, or the politics of this or that nomination, it is much more likely that the real reason for choosing John Roberts and Harriet Miers had nothing to do with Roe v. Wade, or Presidential weakness, or gender politics. Whatever other beliefs either may hold, these are first and foremost individuals who favor reducing the constitutional checks on Presidential authority.

 

This isn’t about abortion—it’s about power.

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Welcome to the Twilight Zone

Sometimes, in their zeal to ensure that gays remain second-class citizens, legislators produce proposals so breathtakingly wacko that you have to wonder whether you have wandered into an alternate universe.

 

Such a proposal has been offered—presumably, with a straight face—by Indiana State Senator Pat Miller, the author and sponsor of a measure entitled (and I am not making this up) “Unauthorized Reproduction.” The bill would require every woman in Indiana seeking to become a mother through “assisted reproduction” to file for the government’s permission. For purposes of this legislation, “assisted reproduction” is not a reference to the sort of “assistance” most of us have reproducing—rather, it is intended to mean the use of in vitro fertilization, sperm donation, or similar technologies.  The bill requires the wannabe mother to file a form called a “petition for parentage.” And only married women would be entitled to be issued a “gestational certificate.” (Ya gotta love the language!)

 

The draft of the law further provides that an “intended parent” who “knowingly or willingly” participates in an artificial reproduction procedure without the express approval of the all-knowing, all-powerful state, will be guilty of a crime—a class B misdemeanor. The doctor who facilitates this heinous crime against humanity will also be subject to criminal sanctions.

 

So, single women who have decided not to wait for Mr. Right are out of luck, along with gay men or lesbians who wish to have children by “unauthorized” means. (In reality, nothing in the bill as drafted, so far as I can see, would prevent a married woman from acting as a surrogate for a gay couple. Nor would anything prevent a “marriage of convenience” if a lesbian desiring a baby could prevail upon a friend to accommodate her. But laws of this sort are rarely effective, and that isn’t really the intent. The intent is to confirm the right of the state to determine what constitutes “normal” and “proper” behavior.)

 

Where does the good senator propose that this intrusion into individual lives stop? What about scofflaws who go to another state for a procedure, or resort to the old turkey baster? Maybe we should require that they abort?

 

The senator’s wacko proposal is a perfectly logical extension of other positions taken by the numerous self-appointed guardians of American “morality” who currently rule us. These are the people who knew better than the doctors who actually examined her whether Terri Shaivo was brain-dead, and who knew better than the multiple judges who actually heard evidence what her wishes were. These are the “compassionate” government officials who know that what poor people really need isn’t food or jobs—it’s prayer and “better values.” These are the lawmakers who know what is best for my children—from the books libraries should loan them, to the internet access they should have, to the content of their biology textbooks, to the sexual orientations of their parents. These are the people determined to use the power of the state to prevent people from sinning. This half-baked bill is part and parcel of the same, single-minded focus on using government to advance fundamentalist religious beliefs.

 

Whatever happened to the philosophy that animated this nation’s founders—their firm belief in restraining the power of government, and separating church from state? And what has happened to the vigilance of free citizens protecting their precious liberties? What can we say about a political environment where a state senator can actually believe that this morally offensive proposal requiring people to petition the government for permission to become parents is an appropriate exercise of government authority?

 

Welcome to the Twilight Zone. 

 

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Spoils of War

Americans really like to wage war—at least when it comes to domestic issues. There was Johnson’s War on Poverty, and Nixon’s War on Drugs (an Energizer Bunny of a war—still going strong). President Bush loses no opportunity to remind us that we are fighting a War on Terror.

We like our domestic wars for the same reasons we like sports contests: they are relatively short-term conflicts, and when they’re over, somebody won, and somebody else lost. Mission accomplished! Let’s go to the mall.

We aren’t quite so hot when it comes to the sustained, boring, never-ending business of making our government function. Where’s the excitement, after all, in policing, maintaining, coordinating and fine-tuning governing institutions? Those tasks offer none of the adrenalin rush of our “wars.” They don’t offer the same kinds of opportunities for pontificating on The Meaning of it All. And, of course, they rarely offer the lucrative rewards available to players who had the good sense to sign on with the winners. So we run American government at all levels pretty much the way we conduct our sporting events: we pay attention while the teams are on the field, and we lavishly reward the guys who win. And then we hit the channel button on the remote.

If it hadn’t been Hurricane Katrina, it would have been some other disaster that showed us the result of our constant denigration of actual government operations, our dismissal of all public servants as pathetic bureaucrats unable to function in the private sector. If we weren’t contemptuous of government, we wouldn’t treat national agencies like FEMA and local commissions charged with flood control as “turkey farms”—good-paying jobs for the political hacks who played with the winning team. I mean, it’s not like those agencies do anything important, right? To the victors go the spoils.

Not that patronage doesn’t have its place. We elect people (presumably) based upon their promise to steer government in a certain policy direction, and they are entitled to fill policymaking positions with people who agree with those directions. Theoretically, at least, we hold them accountable when they give important positions to people who can’t do the job. (And lots of people can’t. As easy as it is to pick on Michael Brown and his “experience” in horse-breeding, even real success in the private sector is no guarantee that someone won’t be clueless when it comes to the very different “business” we call government. It’s a lot harder to run a bureaucracy than it is to fight a battle, political or otherwise.) But most government work isn’t policy—it’s implementation. Is this air clean? Is this food safe? Will this city flood? These are functions than require a longer attention span than four or eight years.

Much as partisan ideologues hate to admit it, there’s a lot of government work that needs to be protected against partisan political priorities—and a lot of jobs that shouldn’t be handed out to turkeys as spoils of war.

  

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