From the Atlantic: The Case for Corruption, Why Washington needs more honest graft

From Jonathan Rauch - the guy who gave us the word demosclerosis - an argument that cleaning up politics has made the political process less functional. He suggests that the governing system lost something vital when political machines were broken apart and the use of patronage to build coalitions became distasteful. Its an interesting counter-intuitive take on what makes governments work.

- Click here for the article.

The government shutdown last fall wasted billions of dollars, upset innumerable plans, and besmirched both political parties. But it did have one constructive effect. Surveying the wreckage, grown-ups in both parties realized that the politics of public confrontation is a lot better at closing the government than running it. So, to avoid a repeat, they decided to try something old. Something very old. In a healthy return to machine politics, they handed budget negotiations over to political hacks cutting deals behind closed doors.

Once upon a time, the budget process was reasonably regular. In fact, it was conducted under what was called regular order. The budget-committee chairmen would do some horse trading to build a consensus within each chamber, the House and Senate would then pass those budgets without too much ado, and the two chambers would work out their differences in a conference committee. Then the appropriations committees would do more or less the same thing, making sure to spread around enough pork-barrel goodies to get their friends paid off and the budget passed. The president and the congressional leaders would be involved throughout the process, every now and then calling a budget summit, but most of the real work would go on behind the scenes.
In the past few years, by contrast, regular order has been replaced by regular chaos.

Public ultimatums supplanted private negotiations, games of chicken replaced mutual back-scratching, and bumptious Republican House members took to dictating terms to their putative leadership. Last fall, after one tantrum too many, Congress seemed exhausted. As part of a deal to reopen the government, it returned the task of setting the next fiscal year’s budget to the budget and appropriations committees, sending them off to a smoke-free smoke-filled room to cut a deal. The result, a trillion-dollar spending bill loaded with incentives for each side, sailed through Congress in January.

How often backroom deal making will work in today’s age of hyper-partisanship remains to be seen, but Congress’s recourse to it represents a welcome rediscovery of a home truth. Politics needs good leaders, but it needs good followers even more, and they don’t come cheap. Loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist, and they need to work. No one understood this better than the street-smart political sage George Washington Plunkitt, who articulated the concept of honest graft.
Plunkitt was a factotum of New York’s renowned Tammany Hall political machine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among his accomplishments was holding four public offices at once, drawing salaries for three of them. It was his custom to opine on politics from the shoeshine stand at the county courthouse, where his reflections were taken down by a reporter named William L. Riordon and published in a 1905 classic called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. His greatest insight was the distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

“There’s the biggest kind of a difference between political looters and politicians who make a fortune out of politics by keepin’ their eyes wide open,” Plunkitt said. “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city. The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.” Dirty graft is parasitic, mere larceny, whereas honest graft helps knit together a patronage network that ensures leaders can lead and followers will follow. Reformers who failed to understand this crucial distinction, Plunkitt said, courted anarchy. “First,” he reasoned, “this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h--- to pay.”

Should we miss pork barrel politics?

A Slate writer does. Earmarks and pork barrel deals helped problems get solved. While they became symbols of corruption (both real and imagined) recently, they provided opportunities for congressional leaders to bargain in order to gain support for legislation, McConnell-Biden Plan now being debated in the House.

Earmarks have been banned in the past few years, along the same time that Congress has become dysfunctional and public approval ratings have plummeted. Are these related?

It turns out that a Congress full of highly principled men and women, fired-up by genuine idealism about America’s future, is a place where nothing gets done.

That’s not to say we should pine for a return to bribery and graft, but watching the prolonged fiscal cliff deadlock (and other Obama-era legislative battles) it was hard not to miss a little old-fashioned earmarking and pork.

Consider John Boehner’s embarrassing failure to line up sufficient House Republican support for his own Plan B legislation on the fiscal cliff. Coalition fragmentation has always been a problem for American legislative leaders, but defections normally arise from the center. Legislators holding at-risk seats sometimes feel they can’t do what the leadership wants, and wise leaders don’t expect vulnerable members to vote for everything. DeLay had a term for it: “catch and release”—only making the absolutely bare minimum of members with moderate seats take tough votes, and making sure no member who might be vulnerable in his next election needed to vote for too many leadership initiatives. But a member whose seat isn’t at risk has traditionally needed to vote with the leadership lest leaders retaliate by curtailing pet projects. Take away these pet projects, and a vital tool of legislative discipline goes missing.
You can't have everything.

Anyone who watched Lincoln saw political operates effectively buying votes by offering members who had been voted out of office patronage jobs. This raises an interesting dilemma, does our demand for hyper clean politics make governing difficult?

The Space Shuttle Will Continue

For another year at least...

People Like Pork

So says the National Journal:

Despite being fed a steady diet of political vitriol about the evils of earmarking, Americans are more likely to vote for a congressional candidate who brings home the bacon, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.
In addition, the public is nonplussed about partisan standard-bearers. More respondents by far said it makes no difference to their vote if a candidate is affiliated with President Obama, former Republican Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, or the tea party movement.


Funneling money back to the folks back home was the only factor that would indicate support for a congressional candidate.

This applies to both 2301 and 2302.

In 2301 we over elections and the factors which lead voters to choose one candidate or party over the other. While people like to talk about principles, we tend to be driven by pocketbook considerations. Who in fact is going to provide us with the material needs we need to live our lives?

It's a similar point in 2302 when we cover the legislature. We say we don't like earmarks, but we punish members of Congress who don't provide them for us. Member of Congress know this, and it helps explain why they seldom give serious thought to deficit cutting. Again, we like it when they say they want to cut the deficit, but we punish them when they do, especially when it means that we must lose a local spending project.

This brings us to another point from 2301: The quality of public opinion. Are we truly rational? Do our individual preferences make sense in the aggregate? 

John Murtha

This might not be the kindest obituary, but the recently deceased John Murtha is heralded as having been a master of pork-barrel politics. As we begin discussing just what that means in my 2302s, this gives us something to talk about.

Update:

Apparently Murtha died due to medical error:

Mr. Murtha was first hospitalized with gallbladder problems in December. He had surgery Jan. 28 at the National Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He went home, but was hospitalized two days later when complications developed. According to a source close to Mr. Murtha -- confirming a report in Politico -- doctors inadvertently cut Mr. Murtha's intestine during the laparoscopic surgery, causing an infection.

Who Knows Defense Best?

Congress or the Secretary of Defense?

Libertarian Pork

Ron Paul voted against the stimulus bill but was still able to secure almost $100 million in earmarks. The best among Texans, but others did well too.

Sweetening the Bailout

Here's how the Senate is planning to broaden support for the bailout (from Slate):

In what USA Today describes as "a maneuver to reverse a stinging House rejection of the plan," the Senate added several popular measures to the original bill. How many? Well, just think of it this way: The rescue package began as a three-page proposal by the Treasury Department and now clocks in at 451 pages. These additions include an increase in bank insurance limits and a host of popular tax breaks for businesses and individuals that add up to $150 billion. Its passage in the House remains far from certain as fiscally conservative Democrats have long opposed extending the tax breaks unless they were offset by tax increases or spending cuts. Still, Republican leaders said they are optimistic that the sweeteners would be enough to convince some lawmakers to change their vote.

"Instead of siding with a $700 billion bailout, lawmakers could now say they voted for increased protection for deposits at the neighborhood bank, income tax relief for middle-class taxpayers and aid for schools in rural areas," notes the New York Times. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times points out that a few "of the changes appeared aimed at enticing specific lawmakers," including expanded coverage of mental illness and a tax break for bicycle commuters. The Wall Street Journal says that the bill now has "a number of tax breaks that have been attacked by fiscal conservatives, including an exemption from a 39-cent excise tax for children's wooden practice arrows."

About that Air Force Contract

The recent uproar over the Air Force decision to award a contract to a team including Airbus, which is not an American company, is a reminder of the importance of "distributive tendency" and the difficulty for goods and services to be provided by government in a manner based solely on merit, without regard to political pressure.

The contract was for the next generation of aircraft refueling tankers and was worth $35 billion. The Air Force claims to be responding to requirements that they look objectively at the merits of the various proposals presented to them--a requirement that stems from congressional dictates--but this doesn't mollify members of congress who want the contract to benefit their constituents by providing jobs in their districts.

In both 2301 and 2302 we discuss the tendency of Congress to respond more positively to bureaucratic proposals that distribute benefits over a large number of districts, even if that process rewards projects of dubious value. The irony here is that Congress itself wanted to curtail the practice, at least in theory. When a real choice is presented to them however, they revert back to the tried and true practice.

The knee jerk reaction is to blame Congress, but are members of Congress accurately assessing the preferences of their constituents here?

Here are related articles:

Boeing was arrogant and proposed an inferior product.

Senator Shelby of Alabama says the contract was won fair and square. [Shelby by the way is a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense and Alabama happens to be where much of the work will be done.

Boeing supporters are set to protest.

Override in the Works?

President Bush may face his first veto override next week.

It concerns his recent veto of a $23 billion water construction bill that include spending projects considered important to many Republicans in Congress.

Two items covered in 2302--the legislature--help explain this: the distributive tendency and constituency service. This may also be an indication that the President's lame duck status, which has been at bay recently, may finally be catching up to him.

Texas Pork

We're number one! (OK, number three, but we can dream.) Only two states get more in federal spending than Texas. Nothing new in that--think about the Johnson Space Center.

Since we like to consider ourselves to be self sufficient conservatives, are we hypocrites? Or are we simply smart to take advantages of the opportunities we are given?

Note the following about our own Ron Paul: "Rep. Ron Paul has long crusaded against a big central government. But the maverick GOP lawmaker and presidential contender also has represented a congressional district that is consistently among the top in Texas in its reliance on dollars from Washington. In the first nine months of the federal government's 2006 fiscal year alone, it received more than $4 billion in federal aid."

He wants to get elected of course. Could he be if he refuses the money?

And how does ACC gets some of this filthy lucre?