Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jonathan Frakes, 61. Fire at will! Directed an excellent episode of Dollhouse. On the other hand: Sub Rosa. Fire at will!

Another week, another load of good stuff:

1. International treaties banning weapons...actually seem to work pretty well. From Charli Carpenter.

2. Ed Kilgore remembers Bert Lance.

3. Ezra Klein on young healthies and health insurance.

4. David Roberts on climate and conservatives.

5. Philip Klein is right about debates.

6. Josh Putnam on what, if anything, the RNC can do about debates it doesn't want.

7. And Reid Wilson introduces GovBeat. Excellent.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Louise Wener, 47. I saw Sleeper opening for Elvis in Berkeley, I guess right at the top of their brief run...they were quite good! I had no idea what happened to her; turns out she's a successful novelist, apparently. How many rock star/novelists are there, anyway? The guy who is John Wesley Harding, I know; also Dr. Frank from Mr. T. I'm probably missing an obvious one.

Some good stuff:

1. Boris Shor on state legislature polarization.

2. Joan Walsh on Ralph Nader. One of the hallmarks of US politics is that democracy is the stated universal preference; support for any other form of government is a strong taboo, one of the strongest there is. In a lot of ways that's probably good; even those who really have no use for democracy not only are forced to declare their belief in it, but in most cases "believe in" democracy, even if they don't actually have any patience for real rule of the people. But those same declarations also make for a lot of confusion, since there's sort of a basic assumption that whatever political system we think is best must, by definition almost, be what "real" democracy is.

3. Julian Sanchez on the Ashcroft hospital showdown.

4. And Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog conquers the world, becomes more of a must-read than ever.

The Single Best Economic Reform for the Next Time

Glad to see that Matt Yglesias is talking about this one again:

3. We should beef up automatic stabilizers in the budget by creating some kind of national rainy day fund that automatically releases unrestricted funds to state governments in times of recession. Some elected officials will use the money to avoid pro-cyclical service cuts and furloughs, while others will use it to finance tax cuts and we'll just live with disagreement about the best way to proceed.

He also wants to make monetary policy work better, but I think he undervalues the ideological resistance to those suggestions (or at any rate, whether he undervalues it or not, I think that strong ideological resistance makes any legislative effort in that area very unlikely to succeed).

However, I continue to believe that countercyclical "automatic stabilizers" for the states should, in principle, be something both sides should be able to cut a deal on. To get Republican buy-in, what's necessary is for those funds to be transfer-neutral in the long run. But if that's the case, with money flowing out of state budgets during good times, I really don't see why conservatives should oppose it in principle. After all, no one really believes that states should massively build up programs during good times and then slash them during bad times, but the incentives contained in state revenue flows make that a likely result. It's also easy to imagine the interest-group coalition that would support this kind of thing, and harder to see exactly which influential interest groups would have a strong incentive to oppose it.

In general, I'm much more willing than Yglesias is to leave things in the hands of legislatures. But I think this is the big missing piece of the New Deal regime of moderating the effects of business cycles via automatic government action.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Dick Allen, 71. 19th all time in OPS+. Classic fringe HOFer; could be the answer to "which player makes for the best HOF argument?"

Plenty of good stuff:

1. Greg Koger on the Rand Paul filibuster.

2. Conservative think tanks and the states, from Patrick Caldwell.

3. Abortion, the Jews, and religious freedom, from Sarah Posner.

4. Andrew Sullivan on marriage and democracy.

5. If you believe that the reason the United States shouldn't run budget deficits is because it will turn into Greece, you really should read Matt O'Brien on why that's nonsense.

6. Andrew Sprung on the future grand bargain -- in health care. Plausible? I don't know. Maybe.

7. And I don't actually care very much about Bloomberg and sugary drinks at all, but I do like a great blog post headline, such as this one (apparently written by Suzy Khimm) from a Sarah Kliff post. And anyway, more press attention to implementation is always a very good thing.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Adam Baldwin, 51. I really need to watch Full Metal Jacket again; I've seen bits and pieces here and there over the years, but haven't seen it all the way through since it was brand new. Perhaps not as great as Strangelove and Paths of Glory, but I'm not as certain of that as most are. Of course, for me he's always Jayne -- wonderful character, amazing performance. I'm terribly jealous of the political writers he's been in twitter arguments with.

How about a little good stuff:

1. I'm not a huge fan of "false equivalence" stuff, but I am a fan of James Fallows, so I'll go ahead and send you to his latest on it.

2. Dan Larison, very good on "hard-liners" and how they police what counts as pro-Israel in US politics. It's lose-lose!

3. No one knows what they're doing. Paul Waldman. Hey, there's a closely related Iron Law of Politics about that.

4. State budgets update, and what they should be up to, from Abby Rapoport.

5. Reporting-while-female, by Marin Cogan.

6. And Steve Rubio asks: why do you care about who wins Oscars? Gives me a chance to make a point I hope I haven't made before around here without doing a whole post about it...I have a sort of rule of thumb about this, which I try to follow and mostly succeed: pick one award to care about, and try real hard not to care about any other. The one I care about, as regular readers know, is the baseball HOF. Which has the advantage that, as awards go, it's a pretty good one; sure, there are mistakes, but they aren't Crash-level mistakes (it's even a larger difference than that; the general "ballplayers that HOF voters like" overlaps heavily with "the most deserving HOFers on the merits." It's pretty obvious to everyone that "movies that Oscar likes" has only the slimmest overlap with "the best movies." Still, I don't think that makes the HOF better to follow, particularly). Anyway, I can't say I follow it all the time...there are a handful of performers who I'm annoyed that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame won't honor, and of course there's my Little Richard/Kennedy Center obsession. But mostly, I stick with it, really. I mean, I'm happy when an actor I like wins an Oscar if I'm watching the show, but that's about it. Same with the other awards. Even the baseball ones; obviously I'm happy when Giants win, but I really don't get engaged in it. (Okay, sorry to run on like that).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Barry Andrews, 55. For some reason, I've never much listened to Shriekback. I really should, at some point. I like White Music, but I'm a very big fan of Go 2. Two stars, All Music? No way.

Aw, no one cares, I suppose. So I'll move on to the good stuff:

1. I really liked this John Sides post about the recent jobs report, and the remaining ones.  I've been saying similar things, but he really nails it.

2. Joseph Cera: the "better off" question may have caused the Democratic bounce by framing the economic question in a way that favors Barack Obama.

3. Republican amnesia: wait, they can't remember why there's a scheduled sequester? Suzy Khimm, fortunately, remembers.

4. Molly Ball on Barry Goldwater's granddaughter, Obama supporter. Although it seemed to me that there was a fair amount of feuding involved in addition to policy preferences. But always happy to link an Arizona story.

5. Abby Rapoport is absolutely right: state legislative elections are really, really important. I'm afraid I rarely talk about state politics, mostly because I really don't know enough to say much about it...basically, every few months I'll toss in a reminder about how important state and local politics are, and that's about it. But it's true! Anyway, she's looking at what's at stake this year.

6. Hey, remember the war on terror? Spencer Ackerman has a quick overview of what's going on now. Helpful.

7. And if you didn't see Mike Konczal's brilliant illustration of Bernanke, QE3, NGDP targeting, and the rest of it then you really should click over now and enjoy. And learn something.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to James Marsters, 50. By the way, he was the best thing about Caprica. Although granted that's not saying all that much.

And some good stuff:


1. Yes, funny is hard, but Alex Pareene is exactly right about this one.

2. Meghan Kiesel tries to track down the George Romney and McDonald's story. 

3. Sylvia Friedel talks political ads with GOP consultant Fred Davis.

4. Ta-Nehisi Coates on Obama.

5. And good for Chris Cillizza for drawing even a little attention to state legislatures and their elections.

Q Day 8: The Ultimate Constitutional Hardball?

OK, this is going to have to be the last one. I'll try to double back to the original post and answer some of the rest in comments if I get a chance this weekend. I feel like the great bloggers of old -- this is, if I'm counting right, my 14th blog post of the day, plus I wrote a column and I'm working on a second draft of a magazine article. And I still have a scheduled baseball post to do later (fortunately, no Watergate post tonight I don't think..I know there's one coming up, but I think it's tomorrow). All in all, a fun way to spend the anniversary. Thanks for all the terrific questions, and sorry I didn't get to all of them. I'll do it again before too long, I'm sure.

So, Greg asks a great question:

Why isn't there more state-level gerrymandering? That is, when there's unified partisan control of the federal government, why don't parties use that to admit more states to bolster their advantage in the Senate? If New York City (or even each borough) seceded from the state, there'd be two strongly Democratic states instead of one. Texas could split off several chunks to create more Republican states.

Two answers. First is: there are all kinds of institutional crosscurrents involved that make it harder than it might seem. Politicians aren't only party actors; they also have their own personal self-interest, which often conflicts with a party interest...for example, a New York Democratic Senator from upstate might worry that she would put her seat in jeopardy without the NYC vote, and prefer two safe NY seats instead of two extremely safe NYC seats plus two lean-Dem other seats. At the same time, some of her constituents may have strong interests in keeping the status quo in New York state government. The bottom line is "what's good for the party?" is often not the most important question politicians and other party actors ask. I'll point out, too, that it would surely have been filibuster bait any time in the last thirty years at least, and maybe even before that, and there haven't been too many occasions to test it in that case.

Second answer? I don't know! It's a complete mystery to me why Democrats in 1993 didn't try to make the District into a state, and even more of a mystery why Democrats in 2009 didn't do it. I've heard several suggested answers (basically they come down to what I think is an absolutely wrong belief that anyone in Nebraska or Missouri would care in an election two or four years later, although it's certainly plausible that the Benator or whoever actually believed it, even though it wouldn't have been true).

Q Day 5: What Could Obama Have Done?

Richard Skinner asks:

Is there anything that Obama could have done, that he didn't do, that would have significantly lowered the unemployment rate in November 2010? This includes actions that would have made it through the Senate, but would have been pretty unpopular in themselves. 

As it happens, the argument over this has broken out again in the blogs today. I'm on Ezra Klein's side on this one: I think the main constraints on the administration as far as the size of the stimulus was concerned were (1) the Senate and (2) the practical question of how to spend money quickly.

That said...

Process stuff: I have no idea whether Barack Obama could have done anything to make it happen, but the Democrats would have been helped a lot had Ted Kennedy resigned in early November 2008, with a special election to replace him scheduled for January 2009. The administration could also have pushed Harry Reid to seat Al Franken in January 2009 instead of waiting patiently for the process to play out for six months (he was seated in early July). The Massachusetts seat would have been a clear plus; the Minnesota seat would probably have been a plus, although it's at least possible that a backlash would have hurt the chances of Arlen Specter supporting the stimulus and then switching parties and hurt the chances of the Maine Senators working with Obama as long as they did.

Also, Obama should have been aggressive from the start with exec branch appointments, thus making it easier for his Fed appointments (see below) to get confirmed rapidly.

Substantive stuff: Of course as Richard knows I'm no economist, but I am completely convinced that the direct and indirect effects of state budget austerity were a huge story in 2010 (and 2011). And while I don't think that the Senate was prepared to sign off on a larger dollar amount of stimulus in winter 2009, I do believe that a state budget fix bill was at least potentially been able to pass. Such a bill would have sent money to the states during hard times and recovered money from the states during good times, and would have (if passed and implemented) prevented hundreds of thousands of state and local government layoffs, the indirect effects of those layoffs as out-of-work teachers and others didn't spend the salaries they no longer had, and the real indirect effect of all those other still-employed teachers and prison guards and others sitting on their money because of the realistic fear of layoffs. That, and aggressively filling Fed openings with people who placed a higher priority on economic growth.

How much of a difference would all of that make? I have no idea! My guess is "a lot", but you'll need to find an economist to run a Question Day to get a better estimate than that.

The Conservative Case for State & Local Automatic Stabilizers

From the Sunday NYT story about North Las Vegas:

When North Las Vegas started to draw up plans for the new City Hall some five years ago, cash flow was no problem...During the good times, the city created parks filled with features that would make even the wealthiest towns envious — a life-size stegosaurus in one, fully lighted tennis courts in another. It created recreation centers with top-of-the-line equipment and built new libraries in rapidly expanding corners of the community. And it drew up plans for City Hall, with a wellness center where bureaucrats could work out between their civic tasks.

Of course: when times are good, governments are going to find it almost impossible to put money aside for a rainy day. After all, no one in Vegas thought the good times were going to end.

If, however, local and state governments were automatically given extra funding during hard times and were required to repay it when they were flush, then they would avoid overspending when it was possible, in favor of a more even approach. Which, of course, is exactly what good economic policy would recommend. But beside from that, it seems to me that conservatives should be particularly against the boom-and-bust cycle in state and local governments, precisely because it is (I would guess) likely to lead to more spending in the long run. After all, there are much stronger constituencies in favor of keeping existing programs than there are for starting new ones. So a government that expands rapidly during good times is unlikely to really retrench as much during recessions.

The strongest reason for some sort of long-term budget neutral automatic stabilizers for state and local governments (LTBNASSLG? Someone needs to come up with a clever short-hand way to refer to this) is the same as the reason for unemployment insurance or FDIC or any of the other depression-proofing that were built-in as part of the New Deal or later adaptations: it's simply good economic practice. But even if conservatives don't believe the Keynesian idea that governments should run deficits during recessions and make it up during booms, they should still, in my view, support a scheme that as they see it should depress the growth of state and local governments.

When Money Matters, Maybe

Bringing political science findings to the blogging world can often make me feel like a killjoy and a scold: I’m always saying that debates, or candidate foibles, or even money spent on elections just don't matter nearly as much as most pundits believe they do.

So I'm sort of happy to be able to speculate that the oodles of outside money being spent on Issue 2 in Ohio, on the ballot next week, seems to be the kind of thing that should matter. Greg Sargent has all the details; this is about anti-labor measures passed by the Governor John Kasich and the newly Republican legislature there.

The logic here is that money should matter more when partisan cues are not present (so in primaries and ballot measures), and presumably also in lower-profile elections, when there's little information available other than in TV ads, mailers, and other campaign-provided materials. It's also an off-year election, so presumably turnout should be very low (and therefore large percentages of the money spent will be entirely wasted on non-voters!); that could mean that voter intensity matter more than it would in a higher-turnout context, which again, I would think, would make campaign spending relatively more important.

However, I know a lot less about money in state and local elections than about money in federal elections, and a quick peek around didn't really support that intuition all that well -- from what I saw, money may not matter all that much in ballot measures after all. For what it's worth, the other thing I came across is that money seems to matter more on the "no" side, which in Ohio is the anti-union side (at least I think it is).

So perhaps even here, money won't matter that much -- and certainly less than some would have us believe.

Automatic, So Automatic

Ezra Klein this morning lays out the case for aid to state and local governments targeted to teachers as justified by the extraordinary unemployment situation:

It's a "now-and-hopefully-never-again" idea. Of all the things you could do with federal dollars, helping state and local governments rehire people they have fired or expand their public-safety payrolls seems like the most absurd. In normal times, if the public-sector is downsizing, that's probably a good thing. But this is not a normal time.

That's reasonable, but I think there's a different and better case to be made for this sort of thing as a standard tool during all recessions, not just the unusual present one. I'm not sure why Klein believes that the public sector at the state and local level is inherently too large; I'd think that the federal government should be, probably, relatively neutral about that. But regardless, the long-term problem here is that since state governments can't run deficits, they're prone to boom and bust cycles, with perverse consequences: during recessions their revenues shrink automatically with decreasing economic activity, which then forces them to lay off employees, which in turn decreases economic activity.

Now, states could budget for recessions; the flip side of this is that their revenues soar (again, automatically) when the economy booms, and they could all be responsible about putting away that money for the future. But, we know, they mostly don't. The federal government could help, via some sort of triggered automatic scheme, which would give money to the states during recessions and then get paid back when the threat was over.

Now, in practice, when recessions are short and mild, all of this becomes unnecessary. In fact, the nature of state budget cycles probably winds up saving them from themselves. After all, the cuts aren't needed until the budget year following the downturn, and by the time the cuts take effect odds are that the economy is already recovering. Still, it's dangerous to the economy during a prolonged downturn, and even when there's no danger to the larger economy it still is most likely inefficient for states to embrace the boom-and-bust.

To be clear: a scheme to automatically stabilize state budgets isn't what Barack Obama has asked Congress for and therefore isn't what Klein is specifically talking about. However, in terms of lessons from the economic disaster of the last few yeas, in my view the effects of state budgeting should go very high on the list of obvious and relatively easy things to fix.

By the way, I'm still wondering whether any economist has estimated the total effects of state and local layoffs on the overall economy, including the indirect effect of still-employed teachers and others who stopped spending because of fears of future cuts.

Catch of the Day

It goes to Alex Pareene, for an excellent takedown of a WSJ op-ed that complains about "blue state bailouts." I think Pareene is correct that this is a talking point we're going to hear plenty of in the future.

Of course, in the world of GOP rhetoric it's all about throwing benefits at Democratic-aligned interest groups, but for those who care about unemployment and economic growth, it just seems nuts to be me to laying off government workers left and right (and blue and red; as Pareene points out, it's not actually a "blue state" bailout at all. Regular readers know my view on this: finding a way to keep state and local governments from undermining anticyclical federal measures is a really big deal, and failure to have initiated a program to make such measures automatic, especially when they had the votes to pass it, is one of the big failures of the Obama Administration.

The problem, again, is that regardless of the long-term fiscal responsibility of state and local governments, they all have an inherent problem when revenues collapse and their responsibilities expand during recessions. Since states don't (exactly) run deficits, the only choices they have are to slash spending and/or raise taxes, in both cases at exactly the wrong time. Of course, if you believe on principle that in a recession it's good for government to maximize unemployment, you might not want automatic stabilizers...

At any rate, great catch!

Automatic, So Automatic

I mostly agree with Ezra Klein's look back today at the stimulus bill and other options available. I completely agree that a $2T bill wasn't possible, and that most of the other suggestions he has collected are some combination of wouldn't have passed, passed anyway, or wouldn't have made much difference.

With one major exception: aid to state and local governments. I'm not absolutely certain that a new automatic stabilizer could have passed, but if Barack Obama had made it a significant priority right away, I think it might well have had a very good chance. And unlike unemployment insurance extensions, which as Klein points out more-or-less happened anyway, additional state and local government aid did not happen, with (in my opinion at least) devastating consequences.

The effects of the recession on state and local governments was quite predictable (although of course the magnitude of the problem wasn't). My impression is that the administration assumed that a bipartisan coalition of governors would be able to successfully push Congress to act. I think that was a reasonable assumption, one that I would have agreed with at the time  -- but as it turns out, it was completely wrong.

An automatic stabilizer scheme could be long-term deficit neutral (see for example this idea). There's no real way to know whether a free-standing separate bill could have passed in spring 2009, and it's certainly important to consider the risks of trying -- remember, there was no guarantee that Arlen Specter was going to switch parties or that Ben Nelson wasn't going to, and it's hard from here to know exactly what might have pushed them (or other marginal Senators who voted for the stimulus) the other way. But this is one where, as it turned out, there would have almost certainly been a significant reward from adding it, and as far as I can tell it's totally realistic to think it had a chance.

Of course getting something like that into law (and, for that matter, automatic changes in unemployment insurance) would also have the excellent effect, as Matt Yglesias has been saying roughly forever, of helping out in future down times, too. Which is why it would still be a good idea now, although it's obviously not likely to happen at this point.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Wisconsin: two Republican state senators were defeated this week in recall elections, but four others survived, leaving Republicans with a slim majority. Obviously, Democrats were disappointed that they didn't do better. But overall, was it good news, or bad news, for liberals?

WaPo Reporters Try to Put Political Science Bloggers Out of Business

Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza look over to today's recall elections in Wisconsin and...utterly fail to hype it beyond reason. C'mon, reporters! If you always were this reasonable, there would be nothing for me and the rest of us political scientists to blog about. Our bread and butter is this kind of stuff -- reporters or pundits look at today's news and extrapolate it wildly without any basis for doing so, we explain why such-and-so even is probably not nearly as big a deal as all that. But if reporters are going to cut in on our racket...well, it's got me worried, I'll tell you that.

I should add a bit of discussion of the actual substance here, I suppose. Just because nothing that happens in Wisconsin today will overturn everything doesn't mean it isn't both interesting and, in at least a limited way, important. To begin with, it's a great political story: Republicans roll in after an election, choose to implement highly divisive policies that they basically didn't even campaign on, and meet all sorts of resistance despite having the votes to do what they want. There's all kinds of stuff here...about the way that particular rules (quorum rules in legislatures, the existence and type of recall) interact with preferences; about the relationship between elections and policy; about political mobilization; about unions and their opponents. And something like this can be important even if it's not about to spark a national movement or change the 2012 presidential election. After all, it's certainly important within Wisconsin, and it's not a stretch to assume that GOP politicians and union activists in other states are all paying close attention to today's results -- and that their future actions may be affected by those results and how they are interpreted.

The Effects of Austerity

Nate Silver:

The jobs numbers are a really important news story that people mistake for being a really important horse race story.

Ah, I like that a lot better than the way I put it earlier.

I also agree with those who are saying that a big part of this is public sector jobs -- as David Leonhardt calculates it, state and local government austerity in the last couple of years have cost about a million jobs. Steve Benen reminds us that "Those laid off workers, in turn, rely on unemployment benefits — which Republicans also want to cut — to try to get by, and have no choice but to spend less, thereby hurting the local economies, too."

But that's not the worst of it!

What they don't mention is that for every teacher, cop, or prison guard who actually loses her job, there are, what, ten? twenty? fifty? who are worried about their own jobs. And that means that each of those state and local government employees are going to hesitate before they book their next trip to Disneyland, or upgrade their wardrobes, or buy a new house. Even though they're still employed. Austerity makes every government employee fear for his job, and surely that has significant economic consequences, even for those who dodge the bullet.

Hey, economists! Does anyone have a good estimate of the effect of all this stuff put together?

Establishment and State Leg Prayers

Ever read one of those news stories in which everyone is wrong?

I'm pretty sure I'm going to disagree with the Jewish state legislators in Minnesota who are upset about what they consider to be in-your-face Christian prayers in the state senate. But everyone in the story, as far as I can see (and maybe I'm just cranky today, but still...), is misbehaving.

The story, at least as the AP has it, is that this year's guest chaplains have been violating chamber norms by making explicitly Christian prayers, rather than the non-denominational ones that have been the tradition. Or perhaps not the tradition, as the AP story refers to at least one Jewish legislator who seems to have a long-time grievance. So, first of all: I think that aggressively non-inclusive benedictions in contexts that call for inclusive prayers are violations of etiquette; if Republican leaders in the MN state senate are deliberately recruiting clergy who they expect to do that, then they're guilty of an etiquette violation, too.

Second, the quote from the offending clergyman, some clown named Rev. Dennis Campbell, is a beaut of mangled history and condescending garbage:

"There's nobody that loves the Jews any more than the Christians, so that was not meant as an insult or disrespect," Campbell said. "Rather, it was a show of respect to Jesus Christ — just like our founders showed respect to Jesus Christ and the word of God when they built our Constitution."

Yeah. Of course it's disrespect, but not nearly as disrespectful and insulting as this "nobody loves the Jews any more than" crap. Ugh. And, no, the framers were not particularly interested in Jesus when putting together the Constitution, other than to keep any deity far away from their efforts to found a secular republic.

But I have to disagree with the remedy proposed by the Jewish legislators, too -- not based on etiquette, but on Constitutional grounds. Currently, Minnesota apparently "requests" nondenominational prayers, but state senator Terri Boniff and other Jewish (and Democratic) legislators want to change that to make such prayers "required." I think they're wrong. How is requiring not only a prayer, but a specific type of prayer, not establishing a religion?

Granted, the tradition of opening legislative sessions with a prayer is one of those things that's probably on shaky Constitutional ground to begin with, but that most of us, even most strong first amendment types, are okay with ignoring. And as I said, I think that it's only good manners for prayers in this situation to err on the inclusive side. But that should be the decision of individual clergy, not a requirement of the government (and I should add -- if the state legislative leaders are de facto requiring Christian prayers, that's a Constitutional problem also).

As an established church, "Nondenominationalism" is just as offensive to the first amendment as is any other type of religion.

(Don't know that it's relevant here, but regular readers know that I'm a Red Sea pedestrian myself, for what it's worth).

State Government

Great post today from Matt Yglesias about Arizona state government. As Yglesias points out, the main consequence of an amateur legislature (which is what you get from term limits, low salaries, and little or no staff) is that you get, instead, government by lobbyists -- because lobbyists are the only ones around who actually know anything about state government.

Other than the obvious implication that states shouldn't have that sort of legislature, I think the real takeaway from his point is to keep in mind that when we hear wacky policy proposals from the states, there's an excellent chance that the politicians involved have no clue about what they're doing. Either they're trying to enact something a lobbyist has given them that they don't understand, or they're off on their own, flailing around.

We tend to assume that someone who offers a bill about, say, immigration is at least vaguely familiar with the basic policy arguments involved, and has drafted a bill at least somewhat carefully in order to achieve the results the sponsor things would be good policy. That's usually the case in Congress. But at the state legislative level, especially in term-limited states, it's very likely that that assumption does not hold.

(Update: doc in comments asks about how state legislative professionalism varies. I'm not an expert, but I can, and should have in the original post, refer you to where to read more: Thad Krousser's Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism).

Just Like Obama?

Dave Weigel says that new Republican Governors who have been pressing for unpopular measures are only emulating the president:

Now, Walker, Scott, and Kasich are doing exactly what they should do, and exactly what Barack Obama did in 2009. They won power; they're using the power to push through structural political and economic changes that will be hard to reverse. They're making the same bet Obama did -- if they do this, the economy will rebound, and their political opponents will have been weakened in a way they may never recover from. If the economy does rebound in 2012, they're going to be in better shape politically. But so will Obama. In the long run, breaking down the power of public unions is going to help Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin. In the short run, if it fires up activists and alienates independents, it puts the next GOP presidential candidate in a tougher spot.

Really? I don't think so. The clearly analogue for what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin would have been card check for the Democrats; they didn't do that. Nor did they pass a campaign finance bill to tilt the future playing field (Democrats did eventually push fairly hard for a minor campaign finance bill after Citizens United, but it wasn't even on the agenda before that). Nor did Democrats take advantage of their temporary 60 vote supermajority in the Senate to flood the federal courts with liberal judges. For that matter, there's nothing magic about 60, and Democrats certainly could have refashioned the Senate into a majority-rules institution, and then passed whatever they wanted even when they "only" had 58 or 59 votes.

The Democrats didn't even bother to secure two solid votes in the Senate by passing DC statehood.

The Democrats did try to take advantage of their temporary majorities in 2009-2010 to pass substantive legislation that Democratic partisans, activists, and aligned interest groups strongly supported, but I can't really think of anything that involved future electoral advantage. Remember, despite what movement conservative alarmists say, there's no real reason to believe that passing ACA is good for the Democrats (in electoral terms) in the long run. One can make an argument that the budget side of what Walker (for example) did is similar to what Obama and the Democrats did, but the institutional side of it, the attack on the unions per se, is exactly what Obama and the Democrats chose not to do.