Category Archives: U.S. Congress

All politics is now national

Elections, Legislature, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2017 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“All politics is local,” the late U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say, but that’s no longer the case. Now, all politics is national.

That’s according to Dr. Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor who spoke at the Clinton School of Public Service Thursday.

Abramowtiz said straight ticket voting, where voters choose candidates from the same party in all races, reached its highest level in 2012 in the 60 years that it’s been studied, and preliminary research shows 2016 no doubt followed that trend. That’s increasingly true whether voters are strong partisans, weak partisans, or independents who lean toward one party or the other. Most of those last folks are just “closet partisans” who won’t admit to themselves or to others that they are really a Republican or Democrat.

Abramowitz said this trend is being fueled by two causes: the increasing influence of presidential elections on down-ballot races, and the rise of “negative partisanship.” That’s where Americans are increasingly voting in partisan ways not because they like their party more but because they dislike the other party so much.

It wasn’t long ago that states and districts commonly selected one party’s candidate for president and the other party’s candidates in some of the congressional and other major races. The most famous example in Arkansas occurred in 1968, when voters pulled the lever for independent presidential candidate George Wallace, Democratic Sen. William Fulbright, and Republican Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. Even as Democrats dominated Arkansas politics until 2010, the state was voting for the Republican in every presidential election starting in 1980 except for 1992 and 1996, when a native son was on the ballot.

Back then, Arkansas Democrats could differentiate themselves from the national party even if they were more liberal than their constituents by restraining their impulses and emphasizing their independence.

Now, it’s all about the party and the presidential candidate. Asked by American National Election Studies to rate parties on a temperature scale with 100 being hottest and 0 being coldest, since 1978 Americans have consistently rated their own party around 70 degrees. However, the opposing party had dropped from just below 50 degrees to 30 degrees by 2012. Fifty-eight percent of Democrats rated President Trump at zero, and 56 percent of Republicans gave Hillary Clinton the same score. Sen. Mark Pryor’s incumbency and last name netted him all of 39 percent against Sen. Tom Cotton in 2014, when Pryor was one of four Democratic incumbent senators to lose in states that had voted for Republican Mitt Romney two years earlier. In 2016, all 34 Senate races were won by the candidate whose presidential candidate won the state. In fact, the only two incumbent senators who lost were Republicans in states won by Clinton. Of the 435 U.S. House seats, 400 were won by the candidate whose party’s presidential candidate won their district.

The old tools – incumbency, principled leadership, dedicated constituent service, even bringing home the bacon – simply don’t cut it any more. Pity the Democratic state legislators in Arkansas who try to buck the trend by explaining to 30,000 (in the House) and 86,000 (in the Senate) constituents why they’re still Democrats but different than Nancy Pelosi. That’s why Democrats in this state are either losing, not running for re-election, or switching parties, as three state legislators did following the November elections.

In hindsight, Gov. Mike Beebe’s 64-36 re-election in 2010 against a decent Republican opponent, and subsequent high poll numbers throughout the rest of his term, remain one of the most impressive political achievements of recent years. Of course, he didn’t have to run in 2014, as Pryor did.

Abramowitz did not offer much hope for Arkansas Democrats, or for the declining numbers of us truly independent voters, or for people who just don’t like partisan politics. We’re now trapped in a cycle. Politics in Washington, D.C., is becoming increasingly confrontational, which fuels voter disgust mostly with the other party, which encourages even more confrontational behavior in Washington, D.C.

So for the foreseeable future, all politics, or at least most of it, will be national. I wonder what Tip O’Neill, the dealmaker, would have to say about that. I wonder if he even would have been elected.

Out of the shadows

Politics, U.S. Congress

DACABy Steve Brawner

On Jan. 21, Ana Aguayo stood on the steps of the State Capitol and admitted – proclaimed, you might say – before thousands of people including police officers that she was committing a crime.

Ana, 28, is an undocumented immigrant, so her crime is not crossing the border to return to a homeland that hasn’t been home for a very long time. At the age of 8, she was bought by her parents from Guadalajara to Springdale, where she was raised knowing nothing of her status. Her teachers taught her English and helped her integrate into the community, and by the age of 16 she was pretty much an American girl.

That’s when she found out she wasn’t. When her peers started getting driver’s licenses and jobs, she learned she wasn’t like them, that she was an unacknowledged guest and not part of the family. And it changed her childhood.

“I grew up living in fear and in the shadows and at a time where the media identified myself as a criminal, when I didn’t understand what had happened, that my parents crossed the border unbeknownst to me,” she said in an interview. Continue reading Out of the shadows →

Here are my Arkansans of the year. Who are yours?

Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Recently, Time magazine announced its “Person of the Year,” based on who its editors believe had the most impact, for good or bad, in 2016. It’s choice was President-elect Donald Trump.

Based on that criteria, who would be the Arkansans of the Year?

The list would have to include David Couch, the attorney who – basically by himself with the financial support of two donors – legalized marijuana for medicinal use in Arkansas. Couch proposed the amendment and qualified it for the ballot in a way that it survived a Supreme Court challenge when all the other voter-initiated proposals were declared invalid. He helped engineer the removal of a rival medical marijuana proposal. Then he ran just enough of a campaign to pass the measure with 53 percent of the vote.

As a result, Arkansans will have greater access to a natural remedy that clearly helps some patients. Sick people will have an option other than manufactured chemicals produced by industrialized, bottom-line-focused pharmaceutical companies. For some, marijuana will replace opiates, which, though legal, potentially are far more addictive and dangerous, even deadly. At least for now, no longer will otherwise law-abiding citizens be forced to sneak around state and local authorities to help themselves or their loved ones.

At the same time, the drug inevitably will find its way into the hands of people who are not sick, including curious young people using it for experimentation, not medicine. The state has taken a step in the direction of full legalization – the potential destination being Denver, where marijuana stores are more common than McDonald’s restaurants. The medical profession must now incorporate a treatment process it doesn’t fully understand. Employers must now negotiate a regulatory minefield using maps that keep changing.

In the upcoming legislative session, medical marijuana will command the attention of legislators who, in many cases, voted against it. Policymakers must now create a system legalizing a substance in Arkansas that’s still illegal in America, while keeping an eye on an incoming U.S. attorney general who has indicated strong opposition to the drug.

How’s that for impact?

Right up there with Couch is Cindy Gillespie, the state’s new director of the Department of Human Services. While so many others argue about past and future health care systems, she is in charge of administering much of the one we’ve got.

What has her job been like this year? In March, she took over an $8.4 billion agency that was a mess, and began cleaning it up. As of May, there was a backlog of 146,000 Medicaid applications, some dating back to 2013. Now there are less than 9,000, and probably none by the end of December. Her agency is in charge of the controversial private option, soon to be Arkansas Works, where the state buys private health insurance for more than 300,000 Arkansans – more than a tenth of us. Medicaid pays for nursing home patients and children’s health care. It also is responsible for finding temporary and at times permanent homes for the state’s foster children – yet another systemic crisis she is tasked with taming.

Two others would qualify for my list. Sen. Tom Cotton increased his national profile through his forceful denunciation of the Obama administration’s Iran deal and further positioned himself as a future presidential contender. If Hillary Clinton had won, he’d be running for president in 2020. (Bonus points for him for becoming a father for the second time this month.) Christie Erwin’s Project Zero organization this year connected 113 children with their adoptive families. What a huge impact she had on all of them.

Finally, it must be said that “impact” is impossible to measure. Seemingly earth-shattering people and events are soon forgotten. What happens in obscurity can set in motion world-changing chains of events. We must place little stock in journalists, or anyone, trying to explain The Meaning of It All. After all, a baby born in Bethlehem at most would have merited a few lines in the birth announcements at the time.

David Couch, Cindy Gillespie, Tom Cotton, and Christie Erwin – those are my Arkansans of the year. Who would be yours?

Please, Congress, if you cut taxes, cut spending too

Debt and deficits, Politics, U.S. Congress

Uncle Sam hangs on for webBy Steve Brawner
© 2016 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Here’s a simple request of our elected officials when they gather in Washington next year with Republicans in charge of everything: If you’re going to cut taxes, please cut spending, too.

I make that request for the future because I am not reassured by the past – not the past year, or the last 35, or the last 200.

Since 1790, the United States has been in a continual state of debt. There was a brief period in the mid-1830s when the debt was very small – it even briefly was paid off in 1835. But it reached $1 billion in 1863 during the Civil War and has never looked back. It has grown smaller at times as a percentage of gross domestic product, but the overall trajectory has been ever higher. In fact, the last time the United States owed less one year than the previous one was 1957, according to the government’s own Treasury Department website.

It took almost 200 years for the national debt to reach $1 trillion – in other words, 1,000 billions. It crossed that point somewhere around late 1981. By 1990, it was $3.2 trillion; by 2000, it was $5.7 trillion; by 2009, $11.9 trillion; and today, it’s $19.9 trillion. That’s more than $61,000 for every American.

So that’s almost 200 years to reach $1 trillion and then 35 years to reach $20 trillion. This is beginning to look like a death spiral.

That’s a discouraging couple of centuries. Then came this year. President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on large tax cuts while barely mentioning spending cuts. He said he wants to spend more on the military, spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, build a wall along the Mexican border, and leave the growing Social Security and Medicare programs alone.

When he comes into office next year, he will be working with a Republican Congress that will want to act quickly to enact some of its long-suppressed priorities while it controls both the executive and legislative branches. They will want to do big things fast while they still can. In 2001, when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, they passed a tax cut and then went on an extended spending spree along with their Democratic counterparts. In 2009, Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress, so they quickly passed their big thing, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

If Republicans want to cut taxes, that’s fine, but that big thing also must be accompanied by another big thing, which is cutting spending by at least an equal amount.

History suggests they won’t do that – that they will focus on the tax cuts and spend more on defense without really cutting spending elsewhere, because Americans like tax cuts and more spending, and elected officials’ jobs depend on being liked.

If tax cuts come first without spending cuts, elected officials will justify it by arguing that the tax cuts will spur so much economic growth that they will pay for the same old spending. And it’s true that tax cuts do spur growth, as does deficit spending. When you have more money, your standard of living improves. It makes no difference, for a time, if that money is borrowed from someone else. But someone eventually has to pay the bill.

So I have this simple request of Arkansas’ congressional delegation: Don’t let history repeat itself. Please, Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton, and Reps. Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman – don’t make the assumption that tax cuts will spur so much growth that corresponding spending cuts can be put off for another time. Have the political will to do both at the same time, and if you don’t possess that will, at least do neither. If your tax cuts more than pay for themselves, then apply the new revenues to paying down the debt, which has not been done since the Eisenhower administration. And if they don’t, then you will have cut taxes and cut spending, which is what you’ve said you wanted to accomplish all along, without adding to the debt.

I make this request on behalf of myself, but also because I have two daughters and eventually expect to have grandchildren too. I’d like to give them an inheritance, not hand them a bill.