The Cure for Paralysis

Pennsylvania’s state fiscal year ended at the beginning of June. In the preceding 12 month session of the state legislature, the governor had three big priorities: the modernization of liquor laws, addressing a large pension deficit for teachers and state employees, and a transportation bill. Given that both houses of the legislature and the Governor’s office are all held by one party, it seemed obvious that all three initiatives would pass.

It would seem Otto Von Bismarck was right about laws and sausages. Even in this all-red government, the process was complicated, and none too genteel. As it happens, an old friend of mine was an important and influential person on one of these initiatives. He complained that some of the good folks in the legislature were “bending him over the squad car” for some impossible concessions. I pointed out that he is 6’5”, and that they therefore must have some practical difficulties with that. He clued me in that certain of the meanest and most diminutive members keep a small wooden stool beneath their desks for just this grisly purpose.

Imagine everyone’s surprise when, at the end of June, in this one-party-runs-everything state, absolutely nothing got passed and signed into law. Huh? How the hell could that happen? At least in part, it has to do with money.

Even the most cursory glance at the evening news, an on-line news rag, an old fashioned paper, or whatever will leave the reader with the correct impression that we are going to hell in a hand basket. This is, undoubtedly, why those who care for me tell me to quit reading that stuff.

To be a bit more specific, the nation is confronted with some immensely complicated and controversial problems. That’s actually not news; we have been so confronted throughout our history as an independent nation. The gravity of the current set of Big Problems is our inability to act decisively in any way toward their resolution. I actually don’t plan to get down in the weeds on issues like long-term unemployment, unaffordable health care, rotting infrastructure, national debt, Medicare and social security, climate change, the defense budget and national security, public education, immigration policy, and so on. I have opinions, and so do you, but I’m hardly an expert on most of them. I do think I have something worth saying about why we don’t seem to be solving any of them.

First, a heaping dose of grim reality: Not a damned one of these issues can be resolved without goring somebody’s ox. Period. They all either cost money to fix or require other kinds of sacrifice. Any public (i.e. tax) or private money required is all going to come out of somebody’s pocket. Doing without or with less of some things, services, and people is going to have real and painful consequences. Actual policy solutions to any and all of our communal troubles will create winners and losers. There ain’t no free lunch, there never has been one, and that’s how we roll. Ain’t no secret.

Now you would think that our elected representatives, knowing this, would deliberate, gather information, consult experts, horse-trade, argue, and eventually strike bargains that attempted to spread the pain and gain of real solutions as widely and equitably as possible. But they can’t.

They can’t because of the immense piles of money that now saturate the American political system in Washington and in every state capital. Right now wealthy individuals, private companies, consortia of various kinds, political action committees, unions, non-profits, single issue focus groups, and God-Knows-What-Else lobby the bejesus out of every state and federal elected official in the country 24/7/365. Many of the lobbyists are former legislators who are now making some real money, and are twisting the arms of their former colleagues. If an elected official decides to cast a controversial vote on almost anything, he or she can count on a tidal wave of money from entities opposed to that vote going to his or her political rivals and possibly turning the next primary or general election. Votes, even not terribly controversial votes, go to the highest bidder.

This also implies that getting reelected matters to elected officials.

It follows then, that nobody is gonna fix nothin unless all that money quits being mistaken for free speech, and is called out for what it is: bribery. Unless we first chase the profit out of politics, there will be no legislative resolutions, good, bad or indifferent, to any of our pressing and serious problems.

It’s also likely that term limits are part of this solution as well. I’m a little less sanguine on this point, because of the value experience sometimes has for legislators. Folks who know how to move legislation and who have long experience certainly bring some extra value to their constituents, but the longer they’re in office, it seems the more concerned they are about staying there. Term limits certainly have their pitfalls. I used to live in Montana, which has term limits and, at least at the time, an unpaid legislature that met every other year. They were amateurs and they did amateurish things sometimes. In the late 1980’s they set the state speed limit for day time driving at “reasonable and prudent” in an effort to show the Feds and others who might try to impose their ideas on Montana that we knew best what was right in Big Sky country. To make a long story short, the range of what some folks considered reasonable and prudent turned out to be surprising. They had to repeal it before anyone else got killed, and because the Federal Highway administration wouldn’t give them any federal money unless they had some sort of speed limit. Common stupidity aside, the kinds of sleazy shenanigans that are in the papers every day in DC or here in the Pa State Capital, would get you tossed in the pokey in Helena. Amateurs, warts and all, are simply more honest.
 

Getting to a less monetized, term limited government at the state and federal level, would require people to step up and run on those principles, it would require them to win elections, and it would require them to act on their principles when they get to the state capital or to DC. Sure seems like a stretch to me. I can’t imagine it happening without a terrible crisis, but I’m pretty confident the status quo will produce some doozys every bit the equal of the 2008 melt down, or much worse. Crises help to make change possible. They also produce wreck and ruin. Why wait?