Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
09 June 13
onservative
Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish
something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress
at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down. Their
refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No
budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns.
Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage.
Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It's as if an entire branch of the federal government
- the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's
problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law
- has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester"
that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure,
programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the President to get
anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new
initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a
president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.
But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington
does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which
are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November's elections
resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor's
offices in all but 13 states - the most single-party dominance in
decades.
This means many blue states are moving further left,
while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting
apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.
Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for
example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's
office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative
session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income
tax rate to 9.85%, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of
several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to
expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities,
fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget
deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and
expanded the power of trade unions to organize.
California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on
top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed
legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education
and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a
vote is likely in November).
On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas
is between Governor Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from
the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state's
income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas
legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the
state's already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut
its budget for higher education by almost 5 percent.
Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same
direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving
$12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales
taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income
depend residents depend on. Missouri's transportation budget is half
what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay
for improvements.
The states are splitting as dramatically on social
issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in twelve states and the
District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of
marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot
program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.
Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting
access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme
Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting
period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.
Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite
directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it
harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who's,
say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go
to Texas, where it's legal to shoot someone who's committing a "public
nuisance" under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas,
which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed
firearm onto a college campus.
The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue
you can imagine. If you're an undocumented young person, you're
eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in fourteen states
(including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where
state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of
anyone they suspect is here illegally.
And if you're poor and lack health insurance you might
want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that's refusing to expand Medicaid
under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will
be picking up almost the entire tab.
Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since
the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the
states on central issues affecting Americans.
Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of
us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits
experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn't work at the state
level, where it's affected only a fraction of the population, than
after it's harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once
said, our states are "laboratories of democracy."
But the trend raises three troubling issues.
First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time,
middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and
higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as
the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to
reverse course. If the idea of "one nation" means anything, it stands
for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.
Second, it doesn't take account of spillovers -
positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without
background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to
another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a
young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the
citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job
opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can
easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other
states.
Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For
more than a century "states rights" has been a euphemism for the efforts
of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now
that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally,
devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of
modern-day white supremacists.
A great nation requires a great, or at least
functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other
government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because
they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be
together.
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