Category Archives: U.S. Congress

The United States, or these United States?

Debt and deficits, Politics, State government, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The federal government will not reform itself. We’re past the point of electing different politicians or enacting different policies. Instead, the government’s underlying structure must be changed through a constitutional amendment process never before used in American history.

That was the message of Michael Farris, head of the Convention of States Project, during testimony before the House and Senate State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committees Wednesday.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times using one process – Congress proposes a change, and three-fourths of the states ratify it. But Article V of the Constitution also includes another provision where two-thirds of state legislatures, or 34, would call for a convention. Delegates would consider constitutional amendments, each state having one vote. Proposed amendments would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states – 38, in other words.

That method has never been used successfully, but Farris says it’s the only hope to fix a broken system. His group is asking states to pass resolutions for a convention that would consider how to impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its powers and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on members of Congress and Supreme Court justices.

So far, Alaska, Georgia and Florida have passed nearly identical resolutions to that effect, and Farris’ group plans a hard push in about 20 states, including Arkansas, this upcoming year. Rep. Bob Ballinger, R-Hindville, said he or someone else will introduce the resolution in 2015 if it has enough support.

Farris assured legislators that Article V’s high standards for ratification – 34 states to call a convention and 38 states to ratify – mean only amendments with broad popular support would have a chance of being ratified.

That being the case, the movement must expand beyond its current base and way of thinking. Its leaders and supporters appear to be almost exclusively very conservative individuals. During a presentation to a home-schooling group Wednesday, Farris suggested one change would involve clarifying the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause so that, “If the states can spend money on it, the federal government can’t.”

That would give a lot more power and responsibility to the states, but it also would mean ending Medicare and Social Security as we know it at the federal level. Such a change would be impossible to sell politically in a lot more than 13 states.

Legislators had varying reactions to Farris’ testimony. Rep. John Walker, D-Little Rock, a well-known civil rights advocate, said the same states’ rights argument was made on behalf of slaveholders and segregationists. Farris said that wouldn’t happen again and that legislators could instruct their delegates not to repeal the Constitution’s civil rights amendments. Later in the session, Rep. Douglas House, R-North Little Rock, and Rep. Jim Nickels, D-North Little Rock, said delegates could ignore whatever instructions legislators gave them. To that, Farris replied, “We’re really dealing in international law here is what this is is because it’s a meeting of sovereign states, and there are recognized principles of international law that govern, and there are no … exceptions in international law or in American law.”

Sovereign states being governed by international law? Such thinking would be a huge leap for a lot of people. Prior to the Civil War, the United States was a plural entity, as in “these United States.” Afterwards, it became a singular: “The United States.” The emerging national identity enabled the country to become the world’s greatest economic and military power. But it’s also led to a bloated, irresponsible, and unresponsive federal government. No state manages its business as badly as the federal government does, and many, including Arkansas, do it much, much better.

A rebalancing of power is needed, though not to the extent that Farris supports. An Article V convention may the best hope of doing that because, as he argued, the government will not reform itself. And with only 13 states required to kill any measure, what’s the worst that’s likely to happen? A bunch of people gather in one place and argue forever without accomplishing anything?

We already have that. It’s called Congress. So if this just turns out to be a big waste of time, we can live with that. What we can’t live with is not trying. Thanks to Article V’s parameters, a convention probably can’t hurt, and it might do some good. I’m for it – a convention, at least, and then let’s see what amendments are proposed.

Everyone’s an extra, even in Congress

Elections, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I’m not the good guy. Neither are you. And neither are Mark Pryor nor Tom Cotton.

I bring that up because we’re in the middle of a campaign season where television ads, and many news providers, treat what should be a statewide job interview instead like a TV show.

And boy, there are a lot of those ads. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the candidates, the parties and independent groups had broadcast 40,576 of them in Arkansas during the 2014 campaign in the Senate race alone as of Sept. 22.

From the time we are born, Americans are fed a steady diet of fiction. Movies, books, TV shows – including sitcoms – often feature three elements: a protagonist who is the hero (along with sidekicks and love interests), an antagonist who is the villain, and extras.

Except in rare cases, whoever spends the most time on camera is the hero, even if the antagonist is more worthy of admiration. For example, in “Rocky,” Rocky Balboa may have had a heart of gold, but he had been a lifetime underachiever and a loan shark’s debt collector, while Apollo Creed was an undefeated champion, smart businessman, and devoted husband and father. We cheer for Rocky.

In our lives, we’re the protagonist, so we believe we’re the hero, which means there must be villains somewhere. Our flaws are merely the personal challenges all heroes must overcome, while the villains never change and have only evil intentions. That’s how a story works.

This is not a healthy thing for any of us. It leads to pride and narrow-mindedness and a lack of grace toward others. It’s particularly problematic in politics. There are many reasons why today’s Congress is dysfunctional, but could one be that its members, raised on television like the rest of us, have bought into the fiction?

For the past year-and-a-half, we’ve watched Cotton and Pryor try to destroy each other on television. Other races with less money at their disposal are behaving in a similar fashion, especially now that the election is nearing. The gloves have really come off in the 2nd Congressional District race between French Hill and Patrick Henry Hays.

I’ve been around enough of these campaigns to know that few of the candidates believe they are at fault. Both sides believe their opponent started it all by lying and slinging mud, so everything they do now is justifiable. In the battle between good and evil, the stakes are too high to worry about fair play.

The next time you’re tempted to put your faith in a politician, or even, for 700 words, a columnist, google “Voyager” and “Pale Blue Dot.” You’ll see a photo of Earth taken by Voyager I from four billion miles away. The planet is tiny. On that little blue dot are billions of smaller dots, all of us running around thinking we are the center of the universe – or at least, the hero of the story.

The truth is, we’re all extras. Every last one of us.

It’s not that either Cotton or Pryor are villains. In fact, they’re both good people – good extras. But when 535 extras journey to Congress, all believing they’re the hero and all looking for dragons to slay, well, then you get the train wreck that Washington has become.

There’s a reason the Constitution’s defining principle is a limitation of power. Our government is designed to prevent the rise of even the most benevolent of dictators for fear of where that could lead.

Under the Constitution, compromise and cooperation are required to accomplish even basic governance, despite the fact that it’s bad TV. For us to think constitutionally requires us to overcome a lifetime of fictional programming, where you don’t compromise or cooperate with the villain. You defeat him, and then you get the girl.

But that’s TV, not real life. I’m not sure if today’s candidates always know the difference. I’m not sure if we voters do, either.

GOP Senate takeover is best for all

Elections, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This is not an endorsement of Rep. Tom Cotton, but it’s best for everyone – in some ways, even President Obama – if Republicans take over the Senate. They are almost certain to maintain control of the House, so a GOP-controlled Senate is the only way our government might be able to function during the next two years.

We’ve seen what happens when one party controls the House and the other controls the Senate in the current political climate – a complete train wreck. Nobody has to take responsibility because everybody can just blame the other side. As a result, Americans have witnessed a series of avoidable fiscal crises and a government shutdown. It’s also why we’ve seen hundreds of show votes that have little purpose but to score political points, such as the Republican House’s dozens of votes to repeal or cripple Obamacare. Those bills died in the Senate, which the House members knew would happen all along.

Just as a split Congress is bad for the country, so too is one-party control. Under the Constitution, the White House and Congress are supposed to check and balance each other. But the way the system has evolved, when the president and the congressional majority are of the same party, they see themselves as members of the same team.

In contrast, the government functioned reasonably well at times from 1994-2000, when Democrats controlled the White House under President Clinton and Republicans controlled Congress. The melting pot of ideas and priorities brought both branches of government to the center. Together they reformed welfare and passed polices that enabled the government to balance the budget, sort of. On the other hand, Monica Lewinsky happened.

If Republicans win control of the Senate (and keep the House), they will have a responsibility to govern, not just oppose Obama. They will need to show the country they can accomplish something constructive so they can win again in 2016.

So there will not be dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare because if Republicans actually did that, they’d have the responsibility to replace it with something else, and they don’t know what that would be.

Instead, GOP members will pass one bill to repeal Obamacare in the House and try to pass one in the Senate to satisfy their base voters. If it somehow survived a Democratic filibuster attempt in the Senate, Obama of course would use his veto. If that were to happen, everyone on both sides would rant and rave, and then hopefully Congress would get down to business and start amending the law – for example, by passing tort reform to limit the excesses of medical malpractice lawsuits. Obama might even sign such a bill because a Republican takeover of the Senate would force (and on some issues allow) him and some congressional Democrats to move to the center.

Mike Ross, who spent 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, has made a similar argument in his race for governor. Republicans already are assured of a minimum of 20 of the 35 seats in the Arkansas Senate. They’ll almost certainly control the House as well.

Ross has said his election will keep one party from controlling everything. That’s true, although the Arkansas governor’s veto is far less powerful than the president’s. While a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote to override, the state Legislature merely needs a simple majority, which is the same percentage that passed the bill in the first place. Still, the governor is the state’s chief executive – the one able to get everybody’s attention, and the one who remains in Little Rock administering state government after legislators have gone home.

So Ross is right. Voting for him will result in divided government in Little Rock, and voting for his opponent, Asa Hutchinson, will result in one-party control.

That’s not an endorsement of Ross any more than this column is endorsing Cotton. There are many other reasons to choose one candidate over the other. Besides, Little Rock is not Washington – not now, and hopefully not ever.

Kansas independent could shake up Senate

Elections, Independents and third parties, Politics, U.S. Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Note to subscribers: This is an updated version of this column that had been released earlier today.

The race between Sen. Mark Pryor and Rep. Tom Cotton is one of the two or three most important in the country because both political parties believe it will help determine control of the Senate. But another race could be even more important – the one in Kansas, where businessman Greg Orman, a member of no party, has a real chance to win.

Orman, an independent, had polled third in a four-man race in a recent Public Policy Polling survey, but with 23 percent support, he was not far behind Sen. Pat Roberts, the unpopular incumbent Republican. Roberts was leading with only 32 percent and had an approval rating lower than President Obama’s. That same poll revealed that, were this only a two-man race between Orman and Sen. Roberts, Orman would be leading, 43-33.

The four-man race is now a three-man race. The Democrat, Chad Taylor, who was second with 25 percent, dropped out Wednesday. The other candidate is Libertarian Randy Batson.

Taylor had little chance of winning in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since the Great Depression. In fact, the best he could have done was split the anti-incumbent vote and elect the Republican, which would have been a huge irony. Typically the argument against voting for independents is that it’s a “wasted vote” – you know, you must vote for the major party candidate you dislike the least, or you’ll otherwise help the other major party’s candidate win. In this case, the Democrat would have been the spoiler. His party’s leadership obviously encouraged him to drop out.

Orman says he simply does not fit into either party. He was a College Republican in 1988, became a fan of independent Ross Perot in 1992, leaned Republican for a while, and then flirted with running against Roberts as a Democrat in the 2008 race. He says he voted for President Obama in 2008 and then Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2010, he founded the Common Sense Coalition, whose purpose has been to elect centrist candidates. “Historically, I’ve tried the Republican Party, I’ve tried the Democratic Party, and I’ve just finally decided that if we’re going to change things in Washington, we’ve got to attack the two-party system and stop supporting it,” he told MSNBC.

He describes himself as “fiscally conservative and socially tolerant,” which might not play well in Arkansas right now but apparently has some appeal in Kansas. The nationwide tension between the GOP’s various factions is boiling over in that state. On Wednesday, more than 70 moderate former Republican legislators announced they were supporting Orman, not their own party’s candidate.

Why am I writing about a Kansas race? Because of what might happen if Orman wins. There are already two independents in the Senate who align themselves with the Democrats. Orman says he will caucus with whichever party will adopt more of a solutions-oriented approach. If control of the Senate in this close election comes down to which party he chooses to align with, he then becomes a powerful swing vote. He could make demands. And that could get interesting.

Then what? There would be three independents out of 100 in the Senate. Maybe Orman’s model could create a template that other independent candidates could follow. Maybe a rich businessman in a state like Arkansas might decide to run as an independent, too. Maybe if there were six or seven independents in the Senate, they could form a “coalition of the uncorrupted” who side with either party or neither depending on the issue, forcing both to behave.

Of course I’m heading toward wishful thinking territory here. Eventually, that coalition would be corrupted, too. Also, two-party domination is almost inevitable the way our system is designed. The most likely good scenario is a shakeup that makes the system work a little better for a while. That’s what happened after 1992, when Perot won 19 percent of the vote basing his campaign on balancing the budget, and then congressional Republicans and President Clinton sort of balanced the budget.

Maybe it starts this time in Kansas.

Here is one of Orman’s ads.