This Is Not News

Pennsylvania House Speaker John Perzel held a news briefing today to try and remove his foot from his mouth a few days after he tried to defend the legislative pay hike that got many Pennsylvania voters riled up enough to toss a bunch of legislators in the recent primary. “I stand here today to acknowledge that I’ve been defending something that the people of Pennsylvania have deemed as indefensible,” he said today. Which, y’know, you think he would have figured out about 30 seconds after the election results came in.

I’m not someone who’s reflexively against higher salaries for lawmakers. I think government work is difficult work that, if done well, benefits everyone, so I have no problem with providing incentives for people to enter the field. But Perzel’s recent attempts to attract sympathy just seem tone deaf. According to the piece I linked to, most PA lawmakers make a hair over $72,000 a year. That isn’t chump change, especially when you consider many lawmakers have enough time to have other business interests. (My former state senator owned a beer distrubitor while in office.) And that’s to say nothing of the expense accounts and per-diem perks that come with office – another Philly-area lawmaker has bought thousands of dollars of books on his expense account.

I guess we shall see if Perzel’s managed to close the books on the issue, or if it will still be festering come Election Day.

I know that doing things for show is a time honored political tradition. And sometimes it’s a valid technique to raise an issue or highlight a stance. But from all indications, Republicans’ efforts to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage isn’t just a political stunt, it’s an ineffective political stunt.

The Amendment has failed a cloture vote with 49 in favor and 48 against. 60 votes are necessary to end debate and actually vote on the amendment, where 67 votes would be necessary to pass it. So you can see that supporters are a wee bit short.

That won’t stop the House of Representatives from voting on the amendment in July, though. Nor will it stop some in the Senate from spinning this as a victory.

Colorado Republican Sen. Wayne Allard, the bill’s sponsor, did not expect the gay-marriage ban to pass but hoped to demonstrate increased support since 2004, when 48 senators voted for a similar bill.

NOT DISAPPOINTED

Allard and other backers said they were not disappointed that the measure only won 49 votes this time.

“Clearly as time goes on there will be more votes in favor of this,” said South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune. “We make a little headway each time this is debated.”

Now on the surface this may seem true – 48 votes last time, 49 now. But Republicans gained several seats in the Senate in the 2004 election, so support should have grown by more than one vote. And in fact, two Republicans who voted yes in 2004 voted no in 2006. (One of them, Arlen Specter, is from my home state. In 2004 Specter barely survived a primary challenge from the right. Now he seems to have no such concerns.)

And according to the article, the Senate isn’t the only place where people are changing their minds.

According to a March 2006 poll by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, down from 63 percent in February 2004.

If the trend continues in that direction, pretty soon opposition to same-sex marriage will be a minority position. (Indeed, Massachusetts has, at least temporarily, given up efforts to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the court decision that legalized same-sex marriage there, in part because many legislators have seen that same-sex marriage just isn’t doing any real damage to society.) I have a hunch that in 25-50 years, opposition to same-sex marriage is going to be one of those things our descendents look back on and wonder how we could ever have thought it was a sensible position.

There’s an excerpt from Barack Obama’s upcoming book The Audacity of Hope on his website. I really enjoyed Dreams from My Father, and I have a hunch I’ll enjoy this next book too. I also have a hunch that it’s going to aggravate a lot of people in the online liberal activist sphere. Obama’s approach is to try to appear above the fray, aiming to build consensus and do something different. As a result, in the excerpt, he talks about how he doesn’t share the view of many fellow Democrats that things are worse than they’ve ever been, and about how both sides in the partisan struggle have gotten caught up in their favored positions and stopped looking for either common ground or innovative solutions. Obama makes clear that he prefers the Democrats to the Republicans, but I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the effort to appear evenhanded is going to be categorized by some folks as a form of selling out, diminishing the Democratic brand, and/or reinforcing right-wing talking points.

I can see where those critiques would be coming from, but from Obama’s last book and his keynote speech in 2004, it sure seems to me like this was always the kind of guy he is. (I have read some reports from folks who watched the Illinois primary more closely that Obama was more of a firebrand at that point.) I guess we will see if he maintains his popularity and high approval with the population at large.

I’m taking a couple of political science seminars this semester, for various reasons too boring to go into here. Both focus on different dimensions of how the public makes its desires known and how government responds to those wishes. I’m probably going to do a set of posts musing about some of the things I read in the process, but for now I just want to pose a question that is the Achilles’ heel of my faith in democracy.

Does the average citizen have what it takes to make democracy work?

Do we know enough to make informed decisions? Do we have the temperament to make good decisions? Are we capable of expressing what we want? And if the answer to any of these questions is “no” right now, do we have a realistic chance of changing that?

I’m following this death penalty case out in California out of the corner of my eye. There appear to be some concerns that the chemicals used to execute by lethal injection can cause several minutes of extreme pain before taking full effect, which has raised the possibility that lethal injection reaches the level of cruel and unusual punishment. Doctors in California have refused to sign off on the chemicals being used, so the state needs to come up with a different chemical cocktail.

I say I’m following it out of the corner of my eye because part of me thinks that once you reach the point of killing someone, how quickly you do it is almost a side issue. Intellectually I understand that it is not – that minimizing the suffering involved is vital if capital punishment is going to be an issue of justice rather than vengeance. But the exact how-it’s-done is not something that reaches me on an emotional level, because I question whether capital punishment can possibly be made to serve justice. But if this case opens up the field for a discussion of exactly what we hope to accomplish with the death penalty, then I’m all for it.

I make no bones about the fact that I have been looking forward to curling at this year’s Olympics since, oh, 2002. And you may recall that a few weeks ago I commented on Washington, D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress. Well, not since chocolate and peanut butter got together have I seen a more fortuitous combination than the D.C. Olympic Curling Team. The premise is, other U.S. territories that lack representation, like Puerto Rico, get to send their own teams to the Olympics. So why shouldn’t D.C.? The organizers decided to focus on curling because they figured that was their best shot. 🙂 Right now the site has an online petition urging the IOC to recognize a D.C. team for 2010, a blog, and some other basic info.

Bring on the curling! And bring on the democracy!

In my American Thinkers class we were discussing the Declaration of Independence, as I was preparing my lecture notes I was struck by a thought: Don’t the citizens of Washington, D.C. have cause for rebelling against the government? The Constitution gives Congress absolute final power over the District of Columbia, yet D.C. has no voting representation in either house. How is this the kind of thing that we tolerate in this day and age? And why did it take me so long to get riled up about it?

While I try to get myself sufficiently up to speed to make some longer posts here, let me link to a couple of blogs that are brainstorming some policy ideas for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania where I’ve tried to chip in to the conversation:

Young Philly Politics has a discussion of how a major investment in mass transit expansion could spur economic activity. Having spent five years in New York, I’m all for beefing up public transit in this town.

Joe Hoeffel proposes that initiative, referendum, and recall should be implemented in Pennsylvania. I am decidedly less enthusiastic about the idea.

When I opened up the local section of yesterday’s Inquirer, I was struck by the juxtaposition of two stories. One dealt with the recent erection of a cell phone tower right near the border of two townships. Neighbors in the township adjacent to the tower are a bit irked that the tower was constructed without any notice or consultation on their part. Meanwhile, the story right next to the tower photo was about Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum threatening to hold up projects that benefit New Jersey if New Jersey does not agree to a long-discussed, long-delayed dredging of the Delaware River in order to make it accessible to more ships.

What struck me is how in both of these cases the organization of political units was ill-suited to actually including everyone affected by the situations involved. In both cases, there are multi-jurisdiction bodies that are designed to help mediate disputes and keep things running smoothly. But public officials and citizens don’t really have much loyalty to, say, the Delaware River Port Authority – they have it to Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Without the ability to get past those kinds of identifications, democracy can’t function as well as it should.

Goss over at Project Antares has declared Wednesdays to be his What If Wednesday days, where he tosses out whatever idea has been percolating in his brain amongst all the stories and other creative pursuits. Last week he suggested the following:

What if– instead of just sending an amount of money to the IRS every year, every single taxpaying american could itemize their taxes?

What if those on the Right Wing could actually specifically ensure that their taxes were not going to be spent on social programs, but on national defense?

What if the informed people of the Progressive Left could specifically choose, on their tax form, the programs that their taxes would be funding, and protect their money from being given to bloodthirsty mercenaries euphemized as ‘private contractors’ as they murder innocent civilians in other countries?

What if every american, right or left, red or blue, had the comfort of knowing that their money was going toward the america that they envision?

It’s a fascinating idea, but I don’t see how it could possibly work. In Goss’s comment section, I argued that the notion is inherently undemocratic because it gives vastly unequal control over the government to different citizens based on income and taxes paid. In this week’s installment, Goss is kind enough to call me “informed and articulate” while giving no ground. (Which surprised me not at all.) He also tries to spell out in a little more detail how the initial planning of such a program would work. I confess I would need to see a lot more detail before I started to come around. I’m just thinking there would be so many ways to game such a system. If you only used broad categories, lawmakers could find ways to earmark their desired programs into whichever category had money in the budget. If you tried to get specific, taxpayers would be inundated with minutiae that would make the proposition system seem like a walk in the park.

Truth be told, I’m suspicious of Goss’s taxation idea for many of the same reasons I’m suspicious of the proposition/referendum system. On the surface it seems like a way to give citizens more direct control. But without building in any kind of institutional framework to help citizens understand the relevant issues and consider various aspects of a problem, it actually reduces the opportunities for deliberation, intelligent problem-solving, and community-building.