Political Cultures

Posted on 2009-11-13 by David

photo credit: www.charlietphoto.com

There are two political cultures that we need to change in order to have a healthy “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” in this country. The first is the culture among the voters as defined by how thy perceive those who hold political office. The second is the culture among lawmakers as defined by how they perceive the purpose and role of government.

Our Pit of Dysfunction

I got thinking about these culture issues during a brief discussion with my brother in which he mentioned an ex-politician that now works for the same company as he does whom he described like so:

He’s the kind of guy who leaves you with a sense that not all politicians are scum sucking bottom dwellers.  He’s a really great guy.

That is a great example of the voter culture that leaves voters not wanting to participate in politics because the whole process feels dirty. That perception makes you feel that anything more than voting might contaminate you by association and has the added effect of making your vote feel useless anyway.

Among politicians the dysfunctional culture is one that views government as a powerful multi-tool which is adaptable to help deal with whatever problem the nation is facing at the time. The perception that government can be so adaptable is dangerous because it causes an excessive reliance on government (a hammer) so that we use it for tasks it was not meant to address (like cutting aboard and wondering why the edge is all jagged) while overlooking other available tools (any number of saws) that are better suited to many of the challenges we face.

The reality is that neither of those cultural perceptions is correct. Many politicians (possibly even the vast majority although my own experience is too limited to prove that conclusively) on both sides of basically every issue are good people who really do want what they think is best for their constituents and the nation as a whole. That fact may explain why, when confronted with their individual elected leader at whatever level, voters find it easy to send the incumbent back even while holding a very low opinion of the elected body they are sending them to participate in. Because government is not a multi-purpose tool to address a wide variety of problems, even well-meaning people (politicians, lobbyists, voters) trying to use it as such will create at least as many problems as they solve and they will be dissatisfied with the results of all their hard work.

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Eight Ideas for Reform

Posted on 2009-11-12 by David

Kyle Mathews shares eight steps he believes would produce a more functional congress at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. It is an interesting list including ideas I’ve heard before and a few new ideas. There is also some good discussion in the comments. I thought it would be worth sharing here in the order that he presented the ideas.

Resolve the electoral status of D.C.

I’ve made my position on this issue clear in the past. Kyle agrees with me that it is important and that the current legislation is the wrong route.

Limit campaign contributions to those who will be represented in the election.

Again, I’ve already shared my thoughts on that (multiple times) and I agree with this idea. I like the term Kyle uses – electoral carpetbaggery.

Water down the filibuster.

This is one I don’t think I have written about. I agree that the filibuster is overused but I also agree with one of the comments which said that placing a time-limit on filibusters would effectively remove them completely. As one who believes that the filibuster mechanism provides an important check on the system I think I would rather put up with its overuse, than do away with it entirely.

Eliminate anonymous holds.

I had not considered this before either, but as a believer in transparency and accountability I agree that holds should not be anonymous. If I put a hold on a bill I should be willing to admit it and explain my reasons.

Increase the size of both houses.

Once again, I have made my position on this quite clear, and once again I agree. I had never considered increasing the size of the Senate, but the way that he presents it – three senators per state – would be workable and would still allow the Senate to function in the same capacity that it was originally designed to function. I especially like the way the three senators per state idea would give each state a chance to bring a fresh face to the Senate in each cycle.

Increase the capacity and role of the Congressional Research Service.

This was another idea that was new to me, but it sounds like a good one. One comment argues that members of congress only use the CBO information if it benefits them. That argument is fairly weak because whatever hurts one side of the debate will benefit the other so the information will almost always be used. More information is almost never a bad thing for the governing process.

Restructure the committee system.

This is another idea I have never addressed, but I agree that the committee system is broken. Committees tend to turn committee members into industry insiders (if they weren’t already) and thus minimize any objectivity that should exist between government and industry. One other idea I once heard related to this was random committee assignments and regular rotation. I think there are lots of ways the committee system could be altered and most of them would be improvements over the current system.

Make all elections non-partisan.

Once upon a time I might have agreed with this, but I now believe that this would actually make it more difficult for voters to get truly informed about candidates and would further discourage voter participation in the political system. I could be wrong about that, but that is what I would expect to happen.

Out of the eight ideas I had addressed three directly in the past and I agree with six of the ideas in principle – some details would still need to be worked out on some of those. If I had to choose all or nothing I think that making all eight reforms would be a positive change overall in our system despite the drawbacks of the two ideas that I disagree with.

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Term Limits for All

Posted on 2009-11-11 by David

One year ago today I pointed out that the subject of term limits becomes popular after an election. Like clockwork it came up again this year. Jim DeMint jumped the gun a bit by announcing three weeks ago that he would introduce a term limit amendment. Yesterday he introduced the bill and today I read an opinion by Mark Tapscott on why he thinks it will actually happen this time.

In previous posts on the subject we have usually had some good discussions, but they tend to be the same from year to year. I’ll summarize the previous discussions in hopes that we can start a step or two down the road and have a more advanced discussion by doing so.

The discussion  that we usually have boils down to the fact that term limits deal more with a symptom of our broken system rather than a cause but that treating that symptom might help to promote the curing of some of the underlying causes. Those who oppose term limits often argue that the people should be free to keep their same representatives as long as they want – but that thinking seems to obscure the fact that the position should always be greater than the person holding it and that society and the political system benefits from regular turnover so that we can’t mistakenly think that the junior senate seat from Utah somehow belongs to Bob Bennett, or that the senior senate seat from Massachusetts was some inalienable right for Ted Kennedy until his death.

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Hit Them Where it Hurts

Posted on 2009-11-11 by David

[quote]As Congress finds new and ever more inventive ways to spend money (both real money and imaginary money) more and more voters are waking up to find themselves becoming fiscal conservatives. First off, I must say that there are not nearly enough of us among the voters and secondly I feel compelled to add that we would be in a much better position to be taken seriously if there had been many more converts to the cause while Bush was still in office.

Earlier this week a friend of mine asked for my thoughts on an idea he had to slow and/or reverse the growth in government spending. (I feel compelled to state that said friend was awake to this issue well before Obama was elected – lest anyone mistakenly think that he just woke up to this in the last week.) His idea consists of two parts and boils down to this:

  1. Have states set the wages for their Congressional delegation.
  2. Have each member of Congress pay for 0.00001% of the federal budget out of their own paychecks. (That’s one out of 10 Million dollars for each member of Congress.)

My initial response was to point out the fact that it would take a Constitutional amendment to make the first part legal due to the provisions of Article I Section 6 that their salaries be paid out of the U.S. treasury (not that state money is not already mostly from the U.S. Treasury).

After thinking about the proposal more I recognize that it only works if both parts are enacted because if only the second portion is enacted it would only take about 30 minutes for the House to pass emergency legislation (or simply attach it to that proposal if they want to be efficient) in which the calculation for Congressional salaries is changed from it’s current “$170,000 plus an automatic annual cost of living increase” to “0.000012% of that year’s annual budget plus $169,999.99 plus an automatic annual cost of living increase.”

The real kernel of the idea was to hit Congress in the wallet – where it hurts – for the egregious budgets they pass from year to year like kidney stones in the national economy. For myself I have long believed that we should make congress feel the pain of their overspending by having them be responsible for a portion of their deficit spending – say 3 times whatever portion of their budget is financed by deficits. (In other words,  if 15% of the budget is deficit spending then members of Congress lose 45% of their salaries – and probably the same portion of their budget for staffers etc. for the year – to help offset their budget.) This only works if there are no exceptions (“oops, we had an emergency and had to overspend – but our regular spending didn’t include a deficit so we should not pay a penalty.”) On the other hand they should also receive some incentive for wise management by offering a bonus of one tenth of any percentage surplus they run for their personal salaries. (That would be, if 10% of revenues were in excess of the annual budget they would get a 1% bonus on their salary for the year.)

Theoretically this would have the downside of encouraging them to raise taxes to cover their spending priorities thus causing citizens to bear a greater cost for their government. Personally I think that would be beneficial because people would spend less time clamoring for more government handouts because they would almost universally feel the effects of any spending increases. Such a change should also have the side effect of having people be more engaged in the process of removing representatives who ignore them because they would be more likely to feel the effects of whatever votes their elected officials cast.

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You Must Answer These Questions

Posted on 2009-11-10 by David

Jim Matheson voted against the health care bills – that’s old news already. Some Democrats have, with varying degrees of seriousness, questioned whether they should  run or nominate someone else for his seat – that’s not really fresh news either. The news that I am following is that along with the ruminations regarding a new nominee there are some important questions being asked among some 2nd district Democrats:

Do you really think you’ll be better off if you take him down in the convention or a primary?

. . .

Is it more important to have the seat in your camp or feel good about pushing out anyone who doesn’t push the party line?

1) Is there anything that I’m currently getting with Jim Matheson as my “representative” that I couldn’t get with a Republican in his seat?

2) Is there anything Democrats living in the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts get with Matheson in office that they otherwise wouldn’t get.

While these are specifically being asked about Matheson by these people right now, they are the same questions that the members of any party must ask when they are unhappy with the incumbent of a seat they currently hold. It should be noted that there is no universal right answer. Sometimes it’s more important to keep a Matheson and other times it’s more important to toss a Cannon. (I chose both of those examples because they are choices that have been made in the past – I do not intend to either endorse or refute those actions nor am I trying to suggest that the actions of the past must determine the actions of the future.)

These are the same questions that Republicans all over the nation are trying to answer on a large scale as well as in individual races (just notice that the number of Republican challengers for Bennetts’ seat changes regularly). Sometimes (such as with Bennett) tossing the incumbent does not do much to endanger the chances that the party will continue to hold the seat while other times (such as with Matheson) it could seriously endanger those chances. Regardless of how it alters the outlook for the party those questions can go either way.

The choice of who to support hinges not only on how well you like the incumbent, but also on answering those questions.

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Why Life Imprisonment is Wrong

Posted on 2009-11-09 by David

photo credit: BlatantNews.com

When I read Jay Hutchinson’s post about Why Capital Punishment is wrong I could not sit still without sharing the opposite perspective so that some people can recognize that the issue is not one sided or clear cut. I am not one who believes in excessive punishment and I would not argue that a justice system without an option for capital punishment is inappropriate, but the longer I live the more I recognize that I have never heard an argument against capital punishment that did not ring hollow on some level.

When Jay speaks of the “hypocrisy” of a government killing to prove that killing is bad he both makes a very poor argument and misses the point of capital punishment entirely. The shallowness of that argument is apparent when we recognize that government has a legitimate position of authority with regard to society and thus has some limited permissions not available to society as a whole. For his argument to work you would have to be able to argue that a father was being a hypocrite for making a rule that his child could not use matches when he uses matches to light the furnace when it goes out. Another example would be trying to argue that police departments are hypocritical for enforcing speed limits on the population while they and other emergency workers regularly exceed the speed limit in the course of their work. The use of capital punishment is not to show that killing is bad, it is meant as a consequence of certain actions as a way to demonstrate unacceptable behavior through the punishment and as a way to remove future threats to society. That certainly does not mean that capital punishment is the only way, or even necessarily the most desirable way to meet these goals, but it is not simply to show that killing is bad.

Of Jay’s three official arguments, two of them hinge on far from common occurrences – the change of heart and the wrongful conviction. That these are not true in the majority of cases does not mean that they are not legitimate concerns, but governing based on exceptions is a very dangerous practice. The fact is that most of the time the person convicted is the guilty party and of those convictions that are overturned a sizable number are overturned on technicalities, not necessarily because the defendant was innocent  – nothing we can do in our justice system will ever make it 100% accurate, but we do fairly well. Jay gives exactly one exceptional example of a change of heart while claiming that “people often have a change of heart on death row.” I’m not sure how we could determine “often” since no metric, including professions of innocence, can accurately draw a line between those who have a change of heart and those who don’t. Even if we could draw that line accurately part of a change of heart for those who are guilty is an acceptance of the consequences of their actions. If society has determined that death is the appropriate consequence for our actions then a real change of heart would include coming to terms with that punishment for our actions. (After all, just because Bernie Madoff changes his heart about defrauding millions of people out of billions of dollars and promises never to manage money again does not mean that he should not face the consequences of his previous actions.)

His third argument is not dependent on the exceptional case – the financial cost of capital punishment is almost universally higher than the financial cost of life imprisonment. Like governing based on exception however, governing based on financial considerations alone is dangerous. Besides that, there are things we can do to change the equation (considering that the vast majority of appeals result in no change of sentence one option would be to reduce the number of available appeals).

For those who are still convinced that capital punishment is just wrong please consider the alternative and see if we are not stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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Constituent Communication Can Innoculate Against Insiderism

Posted on 2009-11-06 by David

When I wrote about a legislator’s role as an information analyst the comments initially centered on Sen. Bob Bennett because of a quote I had used despite my desire to not single anyone out. Later in the comments on that post I made this statement that deserves to be elevated to its own post here:

In my opinion, the best defense against staying too long and becoming part of the problem is to maintain communication with constituents that is open enough for the constituents to indicate when the officeholder is compromising too much (or not enough in some rare cases) and the integrity to step aside when the officeholder finds that they consistently cannot act in accordance with the feedback they are receiving from constituents in good conscience.

Now that Senator Bennett has demonstrated a refusal to maintain open communication with constituents I am singling him out and exposing his refusal to communicate openly.

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Individualism vs Collectivism

Posted on 2009-11-05 by David

photo credit: 416style

It seems that the churning within the GOP is a conflict at various levels between the forces of individualism and collectivism. There is the question of whether the party faithful should do what they think is best or what the party determines to be best. There is the question of whether the national party should be uniform, or whether the local parties should be more autonomous, and there is the question of whether government should enforce the collective good, or allow for more individual choice in society.

With all the jockeying within the GOP there have been plenty of calls for a return to small government principles within the party and generic statements about various groups spoiling the supposed conservatism of the party but in a Los Angeles Times article yesterday Edward Crane sounded a call I never thought I would hear – The GOP Should Dump the Neocons. The first thing I had to do as I read that was confirm the accepted definition of “neocon” to decide if I could believe what I was reading and if there were any implications that I would disagree with. It turns out that I think I can fully agree with this position.

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Decision Time – GOP or ATTAP

Posted on 2009-11-04 by David

photo credit: Pat Rioux

When I learned that Dede Scozzafava dropped out of the NY-23 race, and even more when I learned that when she dropped out she endorsed the Democratic candidate rather than the Conservative candidate, it really got me thinking about what parties are supposed to be. That endorsement would indicate that the GOP establishment in that district is closer to the Democrats than it is to the Conservatives (or else Ms. Scozzafava is playing sour grapes, but somehow I don’t think that’s the explanation). In theory there’s nothing wrong with being closer to Democrats than Conservatives but in practice it depends on what the GOP stands for – which is the question currently raging within the party membership.

Political parties, rightly and of necessity, are coalitions of voters. In theory those voters share some political views in common in order to participate in the coalition. If that is the case then it must be accepted that some parties will have no presence in some locations because in some locations there will be no voters who share the views belonging to a particular party. I’m not suggesting that a place as large as a state would be devoid of voters for any significant party, but individual districts, cities, or precincts might easily be split more between the Green party and the Democrats or between the GOP and the Constitution party than they are between the Democrats and the GOP – assuming that the GOP and the Democratic party each have some core values politically.

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Go Vote

Posted on 2009-11-03 by David

I’d like to add my voice to that of at least six other blogs today by encouraging everyone who is registered to go out and vote today. (Props to Jason for posting four of those.) As this is the year for municipal elections your vote has the greatest impact for three reasons:

  1. You are voting in a smaller race so there are fewer voters in any given contest.
  2. Municipal elections have the most direct impact on your daily life.
  3. Voter turnout is lower so your vote counts for even more among the already small races.

This widespread blogger encouragement to vote is just an example of the last push on election day of what I hope political bloggers can and will do in every election.

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