From the New Republic: The Greatest Threat to Our Liberty Is Local Governments Run Amok: And only a strong federal government can stop them

Here's a provocative article.

It's something we can talk about in both 2305 and 2306, and it reminds me of  counter-intuitive point we will see in Federalist #10. James Madison though that the lack of diverse points of view in local governments were more likely to allow for tyrannical majorities to emerge and threaten unpopular minorities.

Being a wealthy landowner, as were the rest of the Founders, he was worried about what the property less would do to the propertied class. They were in fact a numerical minority. But the same logic applies to any minority group. Local governments - he claims - are dangerous, and the federal government is needed to limit that danger.

The fault lies in the increased number of states that are dominated by one political party, the demise of the press and an increase in voter ignorance about the working of local government. We are not really aware of the abuses happening at the local level because we tune them out.

This is worth a good discussion in class, but its worth noting that a key point he makes is contrary to what we saw in a previous post suggesting that local government are very responsive to the preferences of the electorate. But if the government is responsive only to the majority, and the majority wishes to violate the rights of the minority, there's little to stop them other than the state or federal government.

Here's a bit from the article - note the use of the terms autocracy and oligarchy.

These are boom times for provincial autocrats. In many chunks of the country, state and local politics were once a competitive affair; there was an opposing political party ready to pounce on its foe’s malfeasance. That sort of robust rivalry, however, hardly exists in an era in which blue and red states have become darker shades of themselves. Thirty-seven states now have unified governments, the most since the early ’50s. And in many of these places, there’s not even a remote chance that the ruling party will be deposed in the foreseeable future. The rise of one-party government has been accompanied by the evisceration of the local press and the near-extinction of metro-desk muckrakers (14,000 newsroom jobs have vanished in the last six years), crippling the other force most likely to call attention to official misdeeds.

The end of local media hasn’t just removed a watchdog; it has helped to complete a cultural reversal. Once upon a time, Jefferson and Tocqueville could wax lyrical about local government, which they viewed as perfectly in sync with the interests of its yeoman citizenry. Whether this arcadia ever truly existed is debatable. But it certainly hasn’t persisted into the age of mass media. Nowadays, most Americans care much more passionately about national politics than they do about the governments closer to their homes. They may harbor somewhat warmer feelings toward states and localities, but those sentiments are grounded in apathy. Most Americans can name their president. But according to a survey conducted by Georgetown University’s Dan Hopkins, only 35 percent can identify their mayor. The nostrum that local government is actually closer to the people is now just a hollow piece of antique rhetoric.

With so many instances of unobstructed one-party rule, conditions are ripe for what the political scientist Jessica Trounstine calls “political monopoly”—officials and organizations who have so effectively defeated any potential predators that they can lazily begin to gorge. She writes: “When politicians cease to worry about reelection, they become free to pursue government policy that does not reflect constituent preferences. They acquire the ability to enrich themselves and their supporters or pursue policies that would otherwise lead to their electoral defeat.”

Is the oversight function being corrupted?

Jonathan Bernstein thinks scandal mongering has replaced traditional oversight:

By focusing exclusively on scandals, the House inevitably does less of the real, tough oversight that they should be doing.

As many have noted (see for example Mann and Ornstein’s The Broken Branch), Congressional oversight slumped in the 1990s and then collapsed during the stretch of unified Republican control during the George W. Bush years. The problem is that instead of the traditional oversight, two types of partisanship have emerged: Members of Congress stopped taking their institutional role seriously when the White House was in their party’s hands, and when it’s not they focused on discovering huge scandals instead of just making sure that executive branch departments and agencies were doing what they’re supposed to do.

Poll: 40% say worst gridlock ever

Not a big surprise given the results of the 2010 election.

Washington is locked in the worst gridlock they’ve seen in their lifetimes, four in 10 Americans say as they voice dissatisfaction with how President Barack Obama and members of Congress are handling the country’s problems.

More than two-thirds of those surveyed for a USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday say that members of Congress of both parties are putting their own interests ahead of the country’s, while they’re evenly divided on whether the president is more driven by his own interests or the country’s.
Both 2301 and 2302 should read up on the phenomena of divided and unified government to put this in perspective.

- United States Presidents and control of Congress.
- Gridlock.

What is Triangulation?

Nothing really, other than political bargaining. In his takedown of the phrase Jonathan Bernstein has some succinct things to say about the bill making process:

With unified government, the best course for a president is usually to pass legislation by mobilizing his party. That's pretty much what Barack Obama did during the 111th Congress. The trick is going to be, always, to keep the handful at the extreme left (for a Democrat) happy while also appealing to the 218th most liberal Member of the House and the 60th most liberal Senator. Barack Obama may have, in some sense, wanted to be bipartisan or postpartisan or whatever, but the easiest coalition for almost everything he wanted to get done was going to be highly partisan.

When there's divided government, the calculus changes. While it's still possible that there will be issues in which the easiest winning coalition is constructed beginning with the left and moving to the center, there are other potential available coalitions that involve finding things that both sides really want that the other side doesn't mind that much. That's obviously the case with the tax cut deal: liberals don't care nearly as much about tax rates for the rich as do conservatives (yes, they care a lot -- but not nearly as much). Conservatives do not, it seems likely, oppose UI extension nearly as much as liberals favor it. What this all boils down to is that in the next Congress, there are going to be things that pass with the support of both John Boehner and Barack Obama, and perhaps without the support of some Democrats. Or else, nothing is going to pass at all.

Now, what's "triangulation" in that context? Nothing. Triangulation is an advertising slogan coined by Dick Morris to advertise himself -- to give him as large a share of the credit for Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election as possible. That's all.

Is Congress Broken? Part 2: Is Unified Party Government Ineffective?

Jonathan Rauch thinks so.

The most important accomplishments of the past 25 years have occured during divided, not unified government.

Obama Potential Relationship With Congress

Presidents are often only successful to the degree that they can establish good working relations with Congress. Unified government matters little if the party in Congress does not coordinate -- or is even hostile to -- the party in the White House. Historically Democrats, who tend to be more diverse as a coalition than Republicans, have had internal difficulties that have made governing difficult even when they have had unified control of national governing institutions.

The four years of Carter's Presidency and the first two years of Clinton's are prime examples. Their failures were not the fault of Republicans -- though they did not go out of their way to be helpful -- but rather a consequence of their inability to act as a cohesive unit. Teddy Kennedy went after Carter because Carter was too centrist for his tastes, and Democrats had the numbers to pass health care reform in Clinton's first term.

From Today's Papers in Slate comes a few stories detailing how Obama's transition is taking relations with Congress very seriously:

In a front-page piece, the LAT points out that President-elect Barack Obama is making a concerted effort to reach out to lawmakers. In marked contrast to recent Democratic administrations, Obama's team includes several Capitol Hill insiders, including Rahm Emanuel and Tom Daschle, who are using their connections and reputations "to help build sturdy bridges between the White House and Congress." That effort could go a long way to help Obama's oft-stated goal to "hit the ground running," and Democrats may try to pass an economic stimulus bill in early January and have it ready for the president's signature when he takes office later that month. The NYT also takes a look at the Capitol Hill connections in Obama's team and warns that "such close relationships do not mean that tension between Congress and the White House will not break out." There already appear to be some disagreements among Democrats on how big the stimulus package should be.