American Spring? Time for a Democracy Agenda

There are a lot of policy issues that we can expect to be politically hot over the next couple of years. There is the deficit, of course, and jobs. There will probably be (in fact, probably already is, and should be) a resurgence of interest in global warming. And so on.

But I can't help feeling that the most important issues ahead are what we might call "meta-policy" issues. Specifically, how can we hope to solve all these pressing problems with American democracy as ramshackle as it is today? We need to start talking in a more focused way about how to make democracy work better in the US.

Is this just boring "process stuff" that most voters don't care about? I don't think so. Americans feel increasingly alienated from government. There seems to be an untapped political market for changes that make things work better. What is needed now is to connect a lot of fragmented problems into a democracy agenda. For example:

Elections
Once again, we have seen the folly of having national elections run by partisan state officials. (Remember 2000, when the chief elections official in Florida was the state co-chair of the Bush campaign?)  This year we  had a sudden efflorescence of photo ID requirements, attempts to purge the electoral rolls, attempts to reduce early voting, and, finally, voting lines of up to eight hours. This happened almost exclusively in states controlled by Republicans, and certainly invites the conjecture that Republicans were trying to reduce voting by groups that lean Democratic, such as the poor and students.

That we cannot do a better job on something so simple and fundamental should be a national embarrassment. Other countries can do this; why can't we? The Constitution permits (though it does not require) Congress to oversee Federal elections. National elections should be run by a non-partisan Federal agency, which would set uniform voting days and hours and uniform registration requirements. Oh, and it would make sure there are enough working voting machines. Not rocket science.

Obviously, this will become a partisan issue, and Republicans will paint it as a Federal power grab. But with the striking level of incompetence or worse by state officials in the last election, it is time to put this issue on the table. If nothing else, that will motivate states to do a better job.

Reapportionment
You may have heard that Republicans got a minority of the votes for the House of Representatives, even though they won a majority of the seats. The difference is attributable to the venerable institution of the gerrymander, in which state legislators redraw the boundaries of Congressional districts to make sure that favored Congressmen get reelected. After the 2010 election there were a lot of Republican-dominated state legislatures, hence today a lot of Republican safe seats. But this is a bipartisan tradition, which Democrats practice as assiduously as Republicans.

Therefore, changing it need not be a partisan issue, especially since it won't affect Congressional districts until 2022. (Redistricting is only done after the decennial census.) Congress's Constitutional authority surely extends to using a nonpartisan agency to draw districts, and to writing rules for how to go about it. In the long run, I imagine, everyone in Congress would prefer to minimize the chances of being shafted by the opposite party.

The Filibuster
In 1975, the Senate rules were changed to allow a filibuster to be broken with a vote of three-fifths rather two-thirds of the Senate, but three-fifths of all Senators, not just those present. So staying home counted as vote against stopping the filibuster. In addition, the new rules permitted other legislation to go forward while a bill was being filibustered, so a filibuster no longer required actual talking.

Over time, these rules have reduced the cost of filibustering to the point where virtually everything requires sixty votes in the Senate to  pass. It has been a sort of stealth Constitutional amendment, turning the Senate into a body where any legislation requires a supermajority. This, together with an unprecedented degree of party discipline, has made the Senate, and hence Congress, virtually unworkable, contributing to a loss of faith in political institutions.

There is a good chance, I'd guess better than 50%, that this situation will end next January, and that we will go back to what is now called the "talking filibuster," what I earlier called the "honest filibuster." (I intended a touch of irony, like George Washington Plunkitt's "honest graft.")

Campaign Finance
I was as surprised as Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson must have been to discover that huge pots of dark money did not have discernible influence on the 2012 election. Nonetheless, our present campaign finance system is hugely corrupting, making elected officials the servants of a vast lobbying industry. If there's anything that gives voters the feeling that the game is rigged, that's it. And the public remains interested in reform.

I credit myself with discovering a key fact about campaign finance reform: if you get small contributions from a lot people, you get enough money to swamp the money from big contributors. So you can simply disregard big money, thereby avoiding all the legal and logistical problems of keeping money out.

I suggested one possible approach a few months ago: Give everyone a $100 refundable tax credit for political donations. In order words, political contributions up to $100 are, from the donor's perspective, free. If we assume that half of all tax-filers take advantage of this opportunity, that raises $7 billion a year, which is $28 billion over four years.

(This turns out to be quite similar to the proposal of Lawrence Lessig to give every voting-age citizen a $50 voucher usable for political contributions. That plan is slightly more expensive, about $12 billion a year, but I'm not clear on whether sees this as being every year-- presumably at least every other year, since it's aimed at Congress. He proposes requiring candidates to decline large contributions if they are accepting vouchers, but, as I noted above, I doubt the necessity of that.)

Imagine a world where members of Congress didn't have to be anxious about money.

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That's a first stab at a democracy agenda. Is it politically feasible? If political feasibility is determined by elected officials and opinion-makers probably not. If by voter support, probably so. The problem, as always, is to coalesce individual opinions into popular opinion.

The Ad Martha Coakley Should Be Doing

I don't view myself as having any extraordinary political savvy, so when I see professional politicians screwing up, there's always the possibility that I'm wrong. But sometimes I'm right. One general mistake I see politicians, or their campaign experts, make a lot is thinking that TV commercials have to have great visuals, and therefore must be at least a week behind the curve and miss the hot issue.

I, on the other hand, think that if John Kerry had done an ad of himself sitting behind a desk refuting the Swift Boat allegations, instead of pictures of adorable children, he would have been elected. (Which probably would have meant that the Democrats wouldn't have taken back Congress two years later, but that's another issue.) So here's what I think is the winning Martha Coakley ad, with her sitting behind a desk,or standing in her backyard, or wherever:

"Our country is going through some difficult times right now. We face a lot of problems coming at once, most as a result of their having been ignored for a long time: the banking crisis, failing schools, Afghanistan, our overpriced health care system.

"Solving those problems will take action, not more twiddling our thumbs. But instead of coming up with constructive plans, the Republicans are content to do their best to obstruct, delay or kill whatever the Democrats come up with. They've made the calculation that that's their best shot at getting back into power. Can you think of anything constructive that Republicans have done in the last year? I can't.

"Now they're running Scott Brown for Ted Kennedy's old seat. They're looking for him to join their disciplined army in filibustering any effort to deal with our country's problems. And if he's elected, he will.

"We can't afford more years of delay. Our problems won't wait. We can solve them, but not by ignoring them. If I'm elected Senator, I will go to Washington and fight for you, just as I did as Attorney General.

"Let's get this country moving again. My name is Martha Coakley, and I approved this ad."

Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Room

The most interesting race in yesterday's election didn't make the front page of The NewYork Times. Although it took place in upstate NewYork, it didn't even rate a very prominent mention in the "N.Y./Region" section. And although Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Tim Pawlenty, Rush Limbaugh, and Dick Armey all got involved, it wasn't mentioned at all in the "U.S." section.

I'm referring to the race between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Douglas Hoffman for the vacant seat in New York's 23rd Congressional district. What made this race noteworthy is that the Republican nominee, one Dede Scozzafava, withdrew from the race after the above-mentioned Republican luminaries backed Hoffman, finding Scozzafava insufficiently ideologically pure. (In a truly breathtaking display of chutzpah, Republicans then denounced her as a turncoat for endorsing Owens.) Owens won, making him the first Democrat in that seat since before you were born.

If I were a Democratic apparatchik, I might be a bit saddened by this result, as it seems likely to slow down  the Republican party's slide toward self-destruction. As someone who believes in multi-party democracy and wants to see at least two parties with intelligent policy ideas, I am cheered. Not that Republicans show much sign of learning. The right is already spinning the results, with Mike Huckabee saying it's Republicans' fault for not choosing Hoffman "from the get-go," and other conservatives saying it serves the party leaders right for trying to foist their choices onto Republican voters.

Foist? Yes. For Scozzafava was chosen by the local Republican Party county committee leaders. So a larger issue raised by this election is how we should feel about party primaries versus back-room deals.

By shifting choice from party bosses to voters,  primaries were of course seen as a way to make elections more democratic. Do they? Here's the issue: in a two-party election (other things equal, with some simplifying assumptions, etc., etc.) the winning candidate is the one closer to the preferences of the median voter. That is, the candidate closer to the center of the electorate gets the most votes.

But with primaries, the candidates selected are those closest to the center of their own parties, who may be far away from the center of the electorate. Thus we have the Arlen Specter phenomenon, where a candidate who is easily electable cannot win his party's nomination.

In theory, of course, primary voters could take account of this possibility in voting, and vote for the candidate most likely to win the general election rather than their personal favorite. In practice, this often doesn't happen. That was the idea behind the Democratic Party's designation of superdelegates to the national convention-- the assumption was that elected officials and party officials would be more pragmatic than the rank and file. But this reasoning was not made very explicit, with the result that in the last election there was some outrage at the idea that superdelegates might go against the expressed wishes of voters-- Democratic voters, that is.

What we end up with, it appears, is increasing polarization among elected officials (particularly at the national level, where ideology tends to be more important), and the increasing impossibility of bipartisanship. And if both parties nominate relatively extreme candidates, there is the possibility of electing true loonies, who are far from what most voters would want.

A few weeks ago (October 14), I advocated bringing back the filibuster. As long as we're thinking the unthinkable, perhaps it's time to bring back the smoke-filled room. Without the smoke, of course.