Public Policy and Governance – Page 102

Mitch McConnell Issues A Threat

This morning, I’ve created a theoretical exercise. it’s intended to put you in the proper frame of mind to consider the latest outrage from Mitch McConnell–aka the most dangerous man in America.

Assume we are watching a TV western. The sheriff–having won a hard-fought election in his scruffy border town by promising to keep the residents safe from (unspecified) “bad guys”–issues a proclamation promising to deal severely with law-breakers. Well, maybe not all law-breakers. He’ll deal severely with any law-breakers who supported his opponent in the election.

If someone who supported him breaks the rules, however, he says he’ll look the other way.

If we encountered a show with that plot device, we’d be incredulous–not only is that not what we mean when we champion law and order, we’d turn the TV off while muttering about the ridiculous premise–after all, when TV bad guys decide to engage in nefarious acts, they don’t typically broadcast that intention. If that storyline did appear in our fictional TV episode, we’d expect the local folks–including those who’d supported the sheriff– to rise up and run him and his co-conspirators out of town, thereby reinforcing the primacy of justice over partisanship.

Which brings us to Mitch McConnell.

After the Senate confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (Jackson, a Black female jurist, will replace Merrick Garland), McConnell reacted with a threat.

In an interview with the conservative radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, Mr. McConnell said Republicans would most likely block any Supreme Court nominee put forward by Mr. Biden in 2024 if Republicans regained control of the Senate in next year’s elections and a seat came open.

Along with most lawyers, I was astonished and infuriated in 2016 when McConnell brazenly refused even to consider Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, piously intoning that it was “too close to the presidential election,” although that election was months away and nominees had previously been confirmed to the Court during similar timeframes..

As we all saw, that excuse was shown to be the partisan hogwash it was when Trump nominated, and McConnell pushed through, Amy Coney Barrett a mere six weeks before the November election.

Republicans who had banded together in 2016 at Mr. McConnell’s urging and declared that it was not appropriate to confirm a Supreme Court nominee during an election year had remarkable conversions in the case of Judge Barrett. The Republican leader insisted that he had not changed his position, arguing that because Mr. Obama was a Democrat, it was entirely appropriate for members of his party to block his nominee.

“What was different in 2020 was we were of the same party as the president,” Mr. McConnell told Mr. Hewitt. “And that’s why we went ahead with it.”

Partisan misuse of power, in McConnell-land, is “entirely appropriate.”

America without the rule of law would not be America. As far short of our aspirations and stated beliefs as this country has often fallen, it still seems absolutely incomprehensible that a high-ranking, powerful political figure would publicly–proudly!– trumpet his intention to ignore so foundational a principle.

I often refer to the rule of law, assuming readers understand its importance. The shorthand we all hear is: the same rules apply to everyone. Maybe that’s too abstract.

As an educational site maintained by the US Courts defines the concept:

Rule of law is a principle under which all persons, institutions, and entities are accountable to laws that are: Publicly promulgated, Equally enforced, Independently adjudicated; and consistent with international human rights principles.

The Trump administration waged an unrelenting attack on the rule of law, culminating with Trump’s pardons of some of its sleaziest transgressors. But even Trumpers as morally and ethically compromised as Bill Barr drew the line at publicly announcing their disdain for fair and equal application of the rules.

McConnell is the sheriff from my mythical TV show–the guy who publicly announces that the rules don’t matter–that whenever possible, he will ignore fundamental fairness and the national interest, and exercise power solely to privilege his partisans.

In a very real sense, he has promised a coup.

Michael Flynn must be so pleased.

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Money Makes The World Go Round…

Follow the money…

A recent study found that a dozen “mega donors” contributed one in every 13 Dollars raised by political campaigns since 2009. The study was undertaken in an effort to determine whether and how the role of the super rich had grown following the loosening of restrictions on political spending by the U.S. Supreme Court more than a decade ago.

The growing influence of multimillion-dollar megadonors has been accompanied by another, competing trend: a surge of small online donations to politicians of both parties. Those contributions — in $5, $10 and $25 increments — have given Democrats and Republicans an alternate source of money beyond the super rich.

Still, the study found that the top 100 ZIP codes for political giving in the United States, which hold less than 1 percent of the total population, accounted for roughly 20 percent of the $45 billion that federal candidates and political groups raised between January 2009 and December 2020. The study used data from the Center for Responsive Politics, which compiles figures from the Federal Election Commission.

The study didn’t include state-level contributions, so the picture that emerged is incomplete, but the overall message is clear enough: money matters disproportionately in American politics.

The amount of money at a candidate’s disposal isn’t necessarily dispositive; as a a friend who used to be a political strategist has always maintained, a good candidate with a good message who raises at least enough money to get that message out can defeat an opponent with a much larger campaign war-chest. But anyone who dismisses the significance of campaign funding is delusional.

That said, trying to get a handle on campaign finance is a fraught exercise, and many seemingly good ideas end up generating unanticipated–and negative–consequences.

Take the reforms that have focused on limiting candidate spending. It sounds fair, but imposing uniform limits tend to work in favor of incumbents, because most Incumbents begin the election cycle with high name recognition. Challengers need to build that recognition (which is one reason why celebrities with no government experience have a leg up in such contests). Once a non-famous challenger spends enough to build that name recognition, campaign spending limits kick in. Typically, that’s the point at which the incumbent is just beginning to spend. In other words, just as a challenger starts to become competitive, spending limits choke off political competition.

So what would effective, workable reform look like? Previous efforts–caps on contribution amounts, reporting requirements and the like–have been circumvented by canny lawyers. The hope that small donations facilitated by the Internet would be a countervailing force has dimmed, as it has become apparent that it is easier for fringe candidates to generate those funds from equally fringe voters (evidently, Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken in very substantial amounts). It would be great if we could set time limits for campaigning, but that would probably help incumbents as well–and in any event, run afoul of the First Amendment.

Given the rules as they exist, the only counter to the influence of money in American politics is the franchise–and the multitude of civic and political organizations that are working to expand voter turnout. As we approach the 2022 midterms, Republicans are working furiously to counter those efforts, and as I have noted in previous posts, the GOP goes into each election cycle with a number of structural and financial advantages, not to mention a media ecosystem supporting–nay, trumpeting– their messaging. (And no, MSNBC tilts left but is absolutely not a counterweight to Fox, et al. Accusations to the contrary are assertions of a false equivalency.)

Democratic systems are supposed to reflect the will of the people. Political actors who enjoy enough resources and structural advantages can and do ignore and subvert that will. How we even the playing field, how we facilitate “fair fights” and prevent donations from drowning out the voice of the public is by no means clear.

But at the end of the day, money really does make the political world go around….and we need to figure out a way to lessen its impact.

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Ezra Klein Is Right

Ezra Klein is becoming one of my favorite pundits, thanks to columns in the New York Times like this one from late April, in which (in an aside) he pointed out that America “does have a multiparty political system, it’s just tucked inside the Senate Democratic caucus.”

The column–written before reports of the hardening of Senator Manchin’s stubborn refusal to consider any measure, no matter how good for the country, unless it is sufficiently “bipartisan”–considered the prospects of such bipartisanship in today’s degraded political environment.

As he notes,

The yearning for bipartisanship shapes the Senate in profound ways. For instance, it helps the filibuster survive. The filibuster is believed — wrongly, in my view — to promote bipartisanship, and so it maintains a symbolic appeal for those who wish for a more bipartisan Senate. “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Senator Joe Manchin wrote in The Washington Post. “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship.”

In the absence of the filibuster, the Senate might pass more legislation, but it would do so in a more partisan way, and some, like Manchin, would see that as a failure no matter the content of the bills. “We’d all prefer bipartisanship, but for some of my colleagues, it’s a very high value,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told me.

Klein offers a contrary view: he argues that bipartisan governance isn’t innately better than partisan governance. In fact, he asserts, it’s often worse.

Although it is true that neither party has all the answers, bipartisan support does not usually generate legislation that features–or even includes– the best ideas of Republicans and the best ideas of Democrats. Klein points out the obvious barriers to such a happy result.

A bipartisan bill is simply a bill that members of both parties support. That means they can support it ideologically and they can support it politically. It’s that latter condition that’s toughest to fulfill: The minority party doesn’t want to give the majority big, bipartisan accomplishments, because the minority party wants the majority to lose the next election….

The set of ideas that both parties can agree on is far smaller and blander than the range of ideas that one party or the other likes. To insist on bipartisanship as a condition of passage is to believe that it’s better for Amercan politics to choose its solutions from the kids’ menu.

Klein reminds readers that virtually all Republican elected officials have signed a pledge to oppose any and all tax increases. A bipartisan approach would thus take taxes off the table. But even when tax policies aren’t under consideration, bills with bipartisan support are generally bills that have seen their “edges” sanded off.

Compromise bills can be wise legislation, but they often result in policy too modest and mushy to solve problems. We would never want industries to release only products that all the major competitors can agree on…

Klein concedes that things haven’t always been this polarized, and bipartisanship hasn’t always produced toothless legislation. But the current search for bipartisanship–at least, as conceived by Manchin and Sinema–is really summarized by a couple of memes circulating on Facebook. One has Lincoln saying he’d like to emancipate the slaves, but only after getting buy-in from the slaveholders; the other shows an 18th-Century man considering American independence, but only if the English agree.

Mitch McConnell has made it abundantly clear that the only “bipartisanship” Republicans will recognize is surrender by the Democrats to their demands.

Manchin and his ilk misunderstand a basic premise of American politics. As Klein explains,

This is what Manchin gets wrong: A world of partisan governance is a world in which Republicans and Democrats both get to pass their best ideas into law, and the public judges them on the results. That is far better than what we have now, where neither party can routinely pass its best ideas into law, and the public is left frustrated that so much political tumult changes so little.

It will surprise no one to hear that I think Democrats should get rid of the filibuster. But it’s not because I believe Democrats necessarily have the right answers for what ails America. It’s because I believe the right answers are likelier to be found if one party, and then the other, can try its hand at solving America’s problems. Partisan governance gives both parties true input over how America is governed; they just have to win elections. Bipartisan governance, at least with parties this polarized, does the opposite: It deprives both sides of the ability to govern and elections of their consequences.

Exactly.

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How Do You Spell Despicable?

One of the most telling accusations against self-proclaimed “pro life” activists is that they aren’t really pro life, they are pro birth. If they were really concerned about protecting life, they would support feeding hungry children, and oppose everything from dangerous pollution to gun violence to the death penalty. Instead, their concerns magically vanish once the fetus emerges from the womb.

A report from the Guardian underscores that observation.

At least 10 US states have siphoned millions of dollars from federal block grants, meant to provide aid to their neediest families, to pay for the operations of ideological anti-abortion clinics.

These overwhelmingly Republican-led states used money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (Tanf), better known as welfare or direct cash aid, to fund the activities of anti-abortion clinics associated with the evangelical right. The clinics work to dissuade women from obtaining abortions.

In all cases, the states used these funds even as Covid-19 caused the worst economic upheaval in nearly a century, left one in four families without enough to eat, and resulted in mass layoffs that had a disproportionate effect on low-income and racial minority Americans.

Among the states that have diverted dollars from feeding hungry children in order to line “pro life” pockets are Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Despicable is too nice a word.

These 10 states funneled the money through “Alternatives to Abortion” programs, part of state budgets established by conservative legislatures and often run through state health departments. They not only send millions in federal welfare funds, but also state taxpayer dollars to such centers.

The article details other measures imposed by the states that effectively prevent TANF and other social welfare funds from reaching their intended beneficiaries. A number of those measures are demonstrably racist, but they all begin with the assumption that poverty is evidence of moral failure; the resulting legislation is thus punitive, rather than ameliorative.

Back in 2017, I reported on a survey that found religion to be a significant predictor of how Americans perceive poverty. Christians, especially white evangelical Christians, are much more likely than non-Christians to view poverty as the result of individual moral deficit.

The article cites Missouri as an example of the results of that view:

“We’ve created a new class of Missourians,” Glenn Koenen, a hunger adviser with the left-leaning group Empower Missouri, said at the time the reforms were passed. “We now have legislated that some of our neighbors are too poor to get help from anti-poverty programs.”

Between 1 January 2016, when the reform went into effect, and April 2021, more than 71% of beneficiaries dropped off Missouri’s program. That included 28,643 children and 16,942 families.

Missouri then spent funds not paid to families on other programs, among them the Alternatives to Abortion program. Since 2017, it has sent $26m to anti-abortion clinics, according to state budgets. The average monthly benefit for a Missouri family is $256.

Evidently, the Missouri legislature was perfectly okay with punishing 28,643 children for their parents’ perceived moral deficiencies.

The article proceeds to document the medically-inaccurate “facts” and outright lies routinely told by these “Crisis pregnancy” centers to the women who visit them, and it reports on the religious indoctrination to which they must submit in order to get the minimal help–diapers and milk, for instance–that the centers offer. It also points out that nationally there are far more such centers than there are abortion providers– more than 2,500 ideologically focused, anti-abortion clinics, compared with just 800 abortion providers.

There are a lot of adjectives we might use to describe a refusal to feed and clothe living children in order to force women to give birth. Pro-life is definitely not one of them.

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Taxes And Growth

One of the most reliable laments I post to this blog is the absolute refusal of many policymakers to base their decisions on evidence. We live in a time when experience and reality are no match for the preferred ideologies of our lawmakers. (In all fairness, that phenomenon is probably not new, but it has certainly become more obvious.)

Marketwatch is a business publication that focused upon that disconnect in an article from early May. The title was”Texas, California and Indiana offer surprising lessons about low taxes and economic growth” and the subtitle–which trumpeted the basic conclusion–was “Indiana slashed taxes. Yet wages have fallen even further behind the national average.”

If the subtitle was insufficiently clear, the introductory paragraphs left no doubt:

Among the most common claims of state economic development officials is that higher taxes drive down growth and cause businesses and people to relocate to low-tax states. If you listen to cable news, you are likely to hear dire stories of people fleeing high-tax states in droves.

Yet the high-tax parts of both California and Texas are growing faster than the low-tax parts of both states. And growth in Indiana, which has cut corporate and personal income taxes in the past decade as well as put a cap on property taxes, is dismal.

I tend to foam at the mouth whenever I encounter a reference to Indiana’s property tax cap–not only is the cap bad policy, not only does it disproportionately strangle urban areas in our rural-privileged state, but in an unconscionable move to elevate political game playing over responsible governance, former Governor Daniels constitutionalized the cap–ensuring that, even if subsequent evidence of its counter-productivity emerged, the measure would be virtually impossible to reverse.

The article wasn’t aimed at the multiple flaws of the tax cap, however, so I will leave my extended diatribe for another day.

Why is it that prescriptions for lower taxes, like other seemingly obvious economic “cause and effect” formulations, turns out to be contradicted by real-world evidence?

Modern economic research consistently reports that lower taxes tend to promote growth and migration, but only when all other factors are held constant.

Here’s the rub: It is straightforward to create a model holding all these other factors constant, but in the real world, they never are constant. So the role of taxes has to be weighed against the value of what tax dollars provide.

It took me a long time to recognize the importance of that insight. I used to think it was obvious that a higher minimum wage would depress job creation–until I realized that such a result required all things being equal–and all things are rarely, if ever, equal. The “obvious” result ignored–among other things–the effects of low-wage workers’ increased buying power. We now have real-world evidence from jurisdictions that raised the minimum wage that the “obvious” result isn’t necessarily the actual result.

In the case of economic growth, the article looks at the rivalry between Texas and California, and finds (surprise!) that the popular rhetoric doesn’t reflect reality.

Stories about people “fleeing” California for Texas are common, and Elon Musk’s high-profile announcement that he was moving to Texas fuels the anecdote-driven news cycle. Taxes per capita are higher in California than in Texas, giving weight to the story that low taxes are driving this migration.

In fact, in the last year for which we have data, two out of every 1,000 Californians departed for Texas, while 1.2 of every 1,000 Texans moved to California. This is hardly a notable exodus, and it hardly explains why a rational Texan would head to California. Something else has to be going on.

Furthermore, as the article notes, people are more likely to move from city to city within a state than they are to move out of state, and tax rates vary far more between local governments than between states.

In California, the total state and local taxes in the highest-taxed place were more than three times that of the low-tax county. In Texas, the difference is three times as large as in California.

Further contradicting the preferred story, it turns out that population growth in both California and in Texas is concentrated in the higher-tax places. That’s because–as city planners have long insisted–what matters most isn’t the tax rate (although it certainly factors in) but the quality of life. It’s value for the dollar.

Taxes represent one price for living in a particular city or town, but value — not price — is the key decision variable.

For the average family, value comes from tangible amenities like safe, livable neighborhoods, high-quality schools and great parks and trails. They go far beyond natural amenities such as beaches and mountains.

That’s a lesson I doubt Indiana’s gerrymandered legislators will ever learn.

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