New Jersey and Virginia Prepare to Join Regional Greenhouse Gas Initative to Reduce Carbon Emissions

I’d like to break into the our regularly scheduled doom and gloom, to note a small but important piece of good environmental policy news that last month has poked green shoots up through the policy wasteland of the last 10 months.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is about to get two new members.

RGGI is a consortium of nine New England and Mid-Atlantic states formed to reduce carbon emissions from large power plants through a cap-and-trade system. The program, which applies to power plants with a capacity of larger than 25 megawatts, establishes a region-wide cap on carbon emissions.  Emitters bid in a competitive auction to purchase a permit to emit 1 ton of CO2. They trade in permits when they pollute, or can save unused permits for future use, or sell them to other bidders. States invest the proceeds in energy efficiency or clean energy programs.

The annual cap, which was set originally at 165 megatons of CO2 equivalent in 2008, and adjusted to 91 megatons in 2014, declines by 2.5 percent each year through 2020. The stakeholders are currently negotiating an extension of the program through 2030, which will further reduce CO2.

The first new RGGI member, New Jersey, was an original member of the consortium, but Republican Governor Chris Christie withdrew in 2011, and has vetoed several bills since that would rejoin. The incoming governor, Democrat Phil Murphy, has pledged to rejoin. 

In more exciting news, Virginia is also moving steadily toward joining the RGGI as well.  Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued an executive directive in May directing the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to develop a rule to limit carbon dioxide from existing power plants. His directive emphasized both designing the rule in such a way to allow Virginia to join a multistate emissions trading group – i.e. the RGGI – AND doing so in such a way that a legislative vote isn’t required.  

The proposed rule was finished in October and received preliminary approval in November from the state air pollution board. Several hurdles remain, but it is on track for adoption by the end of 2018.

Bringing New Jersey back into the RGGI fold is good news and will reinforce the program’s stability and expand its footprint to cover more carbon emissions -- New Jersey will have the second-largest amount of emissions of any of the current members. However, bringing Virginia into the scheme is extremely promising for several reasons.

There's not going to be a contested convention

So I'm watching MSNBC and Rachel Maddow is discussing potential permutations of a contested Republican convention in which Trump doesn't win a majority of the delegates.

The one problem that I see with all this talk is that Trump appears to be easily on track to get a majority of delegates, unless things change drastically in the next two weeks, which they haven't in the last two months.

The "establishment" darling Marco Rubio seems to failing to hold up his end of the bargain by continuing to lose. In fact, he's failing to clear 20 percent thresholds necessary to gain delegates in major primaries and as a result is bleeding even more delegates Trump and Ted Cruz in places like Texas.

What/where/who is this GOP "establishment" of which everyone speaks?

Threats to Polish Democracy

After two decades of fairly widespread progress toward consolidated democracy, the last several years have brought some notable setbacks, linked to the election of conservative nationalist parties.

First, it was Hungary. A Christian nationalist party called Fidesz won a free and fair election in 2011, which granted it a supermajority in the country's unicameral parliament. The party then used its power to rewrite the country's constitution to permanently hardwire Hungary's political system in its favor. The reforms crippled the independent media and judiciary. They also changed the electoral system and redrew districts to make it extremely difficult for opposition parties to win a majority. Finally, they required 2/3s majorities for any future government to agree on replacing electoral commissioners, judges and other important officials. Read this post by Kim Lane Scheppele for a concise and depressing summary. 

Essentially,  the massive electoral victory allowed Fidesz to engage in a wholesale restructuring of the Hungarian state; the party then forced through a constitutional overhaul that locks those policies in place no matter what future  governing majorities might think.

Now Poland is exhibiting several alarming similarities to Hungary.

The newly-elected government of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has pushed through reforms that limit the power of the Constitutional Court to review government policy for constitutionality and stack the court with PiS appointees.  A law cracking down on the independence of public media and making it more nationalist in scope appears to be next. We'll see where this goes, but the trajectory is not good.

Both Fidesz and PiS are conservative, nationalist, Christian-identified parties.

While both of these developments are alarming and discouraging, they do raise fundamental points in democratic theory: What issues should merely be "policy" issues that can be changed by regular order, and which ones rise to the level of needing enshrined in a national constitution and requiring supermajorities to change?

Labor's prospects over the next several years look alarming

As another election year dawns, I find myself contemplating the future of the labor movement.

The immediate future looks grim.

That isn't to say that the labor movement is going to die, or that unions won't continue to play a role or help working people. And it certainly doesn't mean that activists should stop fighting for the rights of working people everywhere.

However,  it's much more likely than not that the labor movement is going to suffer some serious hammer blows in 2016 and the remaining years of the decade.

I'll focus narrowly in this post on the spread of (so-called) Right to Work (for less) laws (RTW).

RTW is an insidious concept that cloaks itself in righteous language to divide workers and drastically weaken the power of their organizations.  By the National Labor Relations Act and the state statutes that govern collective bargaining for state and local public employees, unions have to represent all employees in a bargaining unit.  In 25 states, the union has the ability to bargain to charge fair-share fees of all member of the unit, which represent the costs of collective bargaining.  Full dues, which represent political activities engaged in by the union, are only paid by individuals who want to be members who in turn have rights to vote and participate in the governance of the union.

In an aside, remember that in order to represent workers, unions have to win an election to become the bargaining agent, and they are controlled by the members through democratically elected officers. Finally, they can be decertified if a majority of workers vote in an election to remove or replace the union. This is a fact glossed by anti-worker forces.

What RTW laws do is allow workers to free ride of the union's efforts by banning fair share fees. The corporate-backed groups and think tanks pushing RTW argue that workers have a right to not join a union (though they are rather silent on a worker's right to join a union). Of course, though banning fair-share fees, RTW laws still compel a union to represent any one in a bargaining unit. As a result, we create a free-rider problem described by Mancur Olson: why should you pay for something you can get for free?

RTW is insidious because it only appears to cripple a small part of collective bargaining rights: in itself, it doesn't touch the ability to bargain for better wages or working conditions. But by undermining the union finances, it cripples the ability of a union to organize, bargain and protect strong contracts, which can lead to fewer members, which leads to further financial erosion. At worst, a death spiral happens, leaving a bunch of isolated, cynical workers in its wake -- who then can be easily exploited by unfettered bosses.

Currently 25 states have RTW laws, and 25 do not. Since 2011, when Scott Walker eviscerated public sector unions in Wisconsin, three states have jumped on the RTW bandwagon: Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.  From a worker's perspective this should be alarming, because all three of these states are in the industrial Midwest, which traditionally has a strong union presence. Michigan was the birthplace of the United Auto Workers (UAW), whereas the Association of State, County and Municipal Employees (ASCME) originally formed in Wisconsin.

As the parties have polarized and the remaining labor-friendly Republicans retire or are overwhelmed by their conservative colleagues, this momentum is likely to continue.

Extreme Risk:

West Virginia: I suspect it's pretty much all over in West Virginia. Like many Appalachian states over the last several election cycles, the legislature has become sharply more conservative, with the GOP breaking the dam in the 2014 elections. A RTW bill was shelved in 2015, but with GOP gains likely in both houses of the legislature and a Republican taking over the governor's chair very likely in 2016, in 2017, RTW's arrival will be a given.

Kentucky:  A slimmer and slimmer Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives is the only thing standing between RTW and Kentucky. The extreme conservative Matt Bevin's win as governor jumps this state from medium risk to extreme risk, as anti-labor policies are core to Bevin's identity -- in two of his first executive orders, he discarded higher minimum wage requirements for state agencies and issued a hiring freeze in filling unstaffed positions.

The Democrats may hang on to their house majority in 2016, since they were somehow able to cling to it in the low-turnout year of 2014.  However, the off-year election of 2018 is another animal entirely.

Several Kentucky counties have already tried to issue RTW laws on their own; these efforts are currently tied up in court, but the winds are very much blowing the wrong way for labor rights in this state.

High Risk:

Missouri:  Democratic Governor Jay Nixon vetoed a RTW bill in 2015 and the Democrats backed by a few nervous Republicans have managed to sustain those vetoes in the legislature, despite the GOP maintaining a supermajority in both chambers. Unlike West Virginia, the Democrats have a fighting chance in the governor's race in 2016, despite Missouri drifting further into the GOP orbit over the last decade. With a Democratic win in the governor's race, Missouri is likely safe for another four to eight years. With a GOP victory, RTW would likely be the very first thing on the government's agenda in 2017.

Medium Risk:

Ohio: With Republicans in strong command of both houses of the state legislature and the governorship for the foreseeable future and likely maintaining the governorship, Ohio would seem to be a likely candidate for a RTW bill -- and one is currently percolating in the legislature.

However, Ohio Republicans have a bitter memory of the last time they tried to push a major anti-worker bill through the legislature holding them back. In 2011,  Ohio Republicans pushed a Wisconsin-style bill designed to strip most collective bargaining rights from public employees. The bill passed, but  Labor and progressive groups gathered more than a million signatures to force a referendum, in which 62 percent of voters rejected the bill. 

That memory may be holding the GOP in check for now, but if other states continue to push through anti-labor laws, Ohio Republicans will likely eventually press forward.

Possible risk

Montana:  Montana's state legislature has been in solidly Republican hands since 2010, but Democrats have held the governor's chair. Incumbent Steve Bullock is in a reasonably strong position for the blue team, so hanging on to labor rights for at least four more years appears possible in this traditional mining state.

New Mexico: New Mexico currently has Democrats in control of the State Senate, but lost control of the House of Representatives in 2014.  Presidential year turnout will help protect the Democratic senate advantage in 2016 and perhaps help them retake the house.  But if Democratic power in the legislature erodes further, anti-labor legislation will be on the agenda when a Republican is governor.

New Hampshire and Pennsylvania might also be at risk. The Granite state occasionally gets massive GOP majorities in the two houses of its legislature, as it did after 2010. In that case a few moderate Republicans helped the Democrats in the house sustain Democratic governor John Lynch's veto of a RTW bill in the 2011-12 session. As long as the Democrats hold the governor's chair, they should be OK here, but elections are close and there is an open seat in 2016.  Pennsylvania is safe as long as Democrat Tom Wolf, elected in 2014 is in office, but the GOP has a built-in advantage in the state house and its majorities are becoming dominated more and more by extremely conservative ideologues.  Protecting Wolf in 2018 and drawing better districts in 2020 will be key to keeping the Keystone state working people from getting their collective bargaining rights curtailed.

The Supreme Court

This list doesn't count the worst probable hammer blow that's going to fall on labor this year. That would be Friedrichs vs. The California Teacher's Association, which has made its way to the Supreme Court a case set for oral arguments on January 11. The case will likely result in a 5-4 decision -- authored by Sam Alito--  overturning nearly four decades of precedent and invalidating fair share fees for all public sector unions on the specious grounds that collective bargaining with the government is a form lobbying (political speech), which cannot be compelled. Of  course, the union will continue to have to represent the interests of all of its members without their financial support, but I guess speech rights for dues payers aren't as important.

I so do weary of Alito's conception of Freedom of Speech in which it becomes much easier for wealthy owners to speak (see Citizens United) and much more difficult for working class people to organize so they can speak.

Again, we shouldn't despair from the likely reverses that are coming. The movement goes on and labor will continue that struggle. However, we should be aware that the struggle is likely going to become more difficult, though if we can win a few important elections -- we can blunt some of the blows.

And remember, that the only way to overcome RTW both legislatively and on the ground is to organize.

Solidarity.

Oregon's new motor-voter law drastically eases registration, but still leaves a few blind spots

Newly minted Oregon Governor Kate Brown kicked her administration off with a bang on March 16, signing a motor-voter bill on steroids into law.

The law is good policy and will remove some considerable hurdles to voting for a large number of people. However, it does leave out potential voters and may not in itself increase voter turnout all that much.

The bill makes voting registration automatic for any eligible potential voter existing in the Oregon State Department of Motor Vehicles database. This feature goes far beyond current federal requirements, which only make it mandatory to allow an eligible resident to register to vote while obtaining a driver's license or conducting business at a state DMV. According to Reuters, the bill could expand registration by 300,000 voters – an increase of about 13.7 percent over the most recent voter roll.  

That’s good news and brings Oregon’s policies much more in line with most other industrialized democracies, which automatically register voters whenever they move. Coincidentally, most of those countries traditionally have had higher turnout than the United States. Better yet is that these policies will automatically keep track of people who tend to move around a lot and who have their registration fall through the cracks, like younger people – particularly students – and working families.

But the law doesn’t cover everyone. People without driver’s licenses (who often will not be in the DMV’s files) likely won’t be automatically registered; and those individuals tend to be disproportionately poor and people of color as we know from the battles over voter ID in numerous states.

Additionally, political science strongly suggests that easing barriers to voter registration doesn’t necessarily increase voter turnout. Candidates and parties still have to give people a reason to vote and activelywork to effectively mobilize and get them to the polls.[5]

So raise two-and-a-half cheers for Oregon making it easier to participate in the democratic process.  Now progressives just have to make it worth the new voters’ time to actually, you know, vote.

How Minnesota barely escaped Wisconsin's fate

On March 15, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten published an Op-ed in the Huffington Post contrasting the recent economic performance of two very similar upper Midwestern states that have chosen drastically different governments: Minnesota and Wisconsin.

But what we often forget is that Minnesota came perilously close to following Wisconsin to the dark side.

We know the policy story. Wisconsin has been under unified Republican control since the 2010 elections. Governor Scott Walker has spearheaded a hard-right push in state politics: crushing public sector unions, signing “Right-to-Work” legislation that will cripple private sector unions, cutting taxes for the wealthy, stiffing Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, gutting funding for public schools and universities, centralizing power in the governor’s offense, gutting environmental protection, killing useful transportation projects…. Sigh… frankly, to go into detail and finding links is just too depressing. Go read Charlie Pierce so at least you can laugh along with the despair. As Weingarten and others have noted, though, Wisconsin hasn’t performed that well in economic growth or jobs growth.

Minnesota, on the other hand as Weingarten argues, elected Democrat (technically Democrat-Farmer-Labor) Mark Dayton to the Governor’s chair in 2010. Dayton raised taxes on the wealthy, invested in public schools, worked with organized labor and aggressively implemented the Affordable Care Act. The state has performed much better on the economic front than Wisconsin, and indeed the U.S. at large.

But that critical 2010 election actually looked pretty similar in the two states.  In an electoral disaster, Democrats lost majorities in both houses of the Minnesota State Legislature, turning an 87-47 majority in the House into a 72-62 minority. A 46-21 Senate supermajority became a 37-30 minority. In Wisconsin narrow Democratic majorities became a medium-sized 19-14 Republican majority in the Senate and a 58-41 majority in the Assembly.

The Minnesota legislature was interested in many of the same things that Walker wanted – after a budget standoff with Dayton in 2011, they tried to push a “Right-to-Work” law through in a constitutional referendum in 2012, though it failed to make the ballot.

The difference was in the Governor’s Race. Walker beatDemocrat Tom Barrett in a clear though reasonably close election by 120,000 votes out of about 2.2 million cast (52.3 percent to 46.5 percent). Dayton, in contrast, barely squeaked by conservative Republican Tom Emmer by an 8,730 vote plurality out of 2.1 million cast (43.6 percent to 43.2 percent).

Maybe it was Dayton’s higher name-recognition as a former Senator; maybe it was the fact that the incumbent in Minnesota was a Republican and not a Democrat.  But whatever the reason, those 8,730 votes put Minnesota progressives in position to block the attacks on labor and public services that took place in Wisconsin. And they left them in position to push a progressive agenda when Democrats managed to take back both chambers of the state legislature in 2012.  

Let that be a bit more motivation to knock on one more door, make one more phone call and give $10 more in the next state election.

Medicaid expansion: Who's next?

Right now, we're all breathlessly watching the Healthcare.gov to see if glitches are getting fixed and people are signing up,  but let's pause from that briefly today and look down the road a bit.

One of the biggest immediate holes in the Affordable Care Act opened up when the Supreme Court ruled that states didn't have to expand Medicaid in order to keep their current federal support. Getting more vulnerable people under the poverty line access to health insurance needs to be  a major priority over the next several years. So which states might can we most effectively organize in to push Medicaid expansion?

Currently, 25 states have embraced the expansion, while 25 are still debating the issue or have rejected the expansion for now. (Three days ago, Alaska became the most recent state to announce that it wouldn't be taking the money).

But just because they say "no" today doesn't mean they'll say "no" tomorrow. As Kaiser Foundation research points out, offering lots of federal money to states eventually got nearly every state to deploy some sort of Medicaid program in the 1960s and 1970s and some sort of CHIP programs (children's health insurance) in the late 1990s.

Oddly enough, the Medicaid expansion of the ACA is getting adopted at almost the exact same pace that the original Medicaid was adopted. After one year of available matching funds in 1966, 26 states had opted into the program. A month before the expansion under the ACA goes live, 26 states are at least tentatively (and mostly firmly) in the expansion camp.

The similarities may end there, as Republican intransigence across a wide swath of the South and West will likely block expansion for the foreseeable future. However, even in some GOP-dominated states like Arizona and North Dakota, the expansion has been adopted, so this provision is not absolute.

More immediately though, there are several very ripe target states activists should focus on for immediate results. I list these below with how many uninsured people would be covered under Medicaid expansion (numbers again courtesy of Kaiser), in rough order of degree of difficulty of passing an expansion over the next two years.

Obamacare moderate emerges from the Louisiana jungle, but why?

Sam Knight, a smart guy who occasionally holds down the Washington Monthly's  Political Animal Blog for the weekend, notes some interesting election results in a Louisiana Congressional election on Saturday. Republican candidate Vance McAllister easily defeated fellow Republican Ned Riser, who was backed by tea-party groups, 59.6 percent to 40.4 percent

Knight argues that the election shows that the tea party is losing sway in its scorched-earth war against the Affordable Care Act, as McAllister suggested that he wanted to work with Democrats to improve the law, and hinted that these stances may show a recognition among GOP voters of the reality of Obamacare. Riser had the backing of other establishment Republican groups as well, while McAllister self-financed his campaign and earned a celebrity endorsement from Duck Dynasty reality-TV star Phil Robertson.

I hope Knight is right, but I suspect that there are some funky electoral dynamics at work here that may explain McAllister's stances.

Louisiana uses a two-stage "jungle primary" system in which a wide number of candidates jump into the first round, and if none win a majority, the top two candidates advance to a run-off. Riser finished first in the primary with 32 percent of the vote, while McAllister had 17.9 percent. (primary results here)

McAllister had more ground to make-up, but he had several avenues to get it:

1. He could try to pick up the votes from the other GOP candidates who got knocked out of the run off, whose support made up 18.2 percent of the votes.

2. He could try to pick up support from voters who supported the Democratic candidates -- none of whom made the run-off, who collectively collected 29.9 percent of the votes.

The math looks pretty obvious here. McAllister can probably keep his primary supporters, pick up at least a sliver of other supporters from eliminated GOP candidates and grab almost all the Democratic voters by running conservative on most issues (God and guns in this case) while speaking some sense on the side about health care.

He was able to increase his vote total by 36,000, while Riser only increased his by 3,800. Turnout only decreased from 21.2 percent to 18.3 percent of registered voters, so my theory at least seems plausible. (Since the results from the run-off aren't official, we don't know official turn out figures from partisans in either party. In any case, in this part of Louisiana those numbers are only marginally useful for our analysis, as Democrats still outnumber the GOP, but often tend to vote for Republicans in large numbers.)

I read this as a short-term tactical move to attract moderate and a few liberal voters in a two-way general election who liked the opportunity to keep a pure tea-partier out of office. Notice how as a federal office holder, he'll have no say in whether Louisiana will expand Medicaid, essentially making his election position a no-cost proposition. He'll have plenty of time to establish his hard-right credentials over a year in Congress during which he'll get to vote "no" on lots of things. Next year as an incumbent, he can run on that record and discard the Democratic part of his coalition.

Finally, as a self-funder, he's not as dependent on either tea-party or other GOP party organizations to put together a campaign, so he might be able afford to drift a bit from party orthodoxy on one issue. 

Incidentally, the Christian Science Monitor article that Knight cites hints at this dynamic as well, though Knight doesn't go into it:

Riser and McAllister largely agreed on many issues. Both opposed abortion, favor strong gun rights and criticize the levels of federal spending and debt.
Their sharpest distinction rested with President Barack Obama's signature health care law.

Both opposed the health overhaul, but Riser wanted only repeal, saying the law will harm businesses and families and can't be fixed.

McAllister said repeal had no chance with Democrats leading the Senate and White House, so he said Congress should work to improve the law. He also wants Louisiana to expand its Medicaid program to give insurance to the working poor, an expansion that Riser opposed.

The positions put McAllister at odds with some tea party supporters but generated support from Democrats who had no candidate of their own in the runoff.

(Italics mine)

Again, I'd love to be wrong here, but I think my theory is just as plausible as Knight's with the data we have.

The more general question is what sort of impact the "jungle primary" has on results, but I don't know too much of the political science on it -- though France has had essentially the same system for years with some odd results from time to time.

Virginnia Attorney General Update (or: Your daily dose of good government, non-snark edition)

One of the things that has struck me about monitoring the ongoing canvassing and checking surrounding the dead heat in the Virginia Attorney General's election is how professional the whole process has been. The State Board of Elections and county boards have acted with patience, diligence and professionalism. 

Example: The GOP asked for a recanvass in several heavily Democratic Richmond precincts. The local board of elections complied and found a voting machine and several paper ballots that had been left out of the county, which ended up netting about 100 votes for Democrat Chris Herring.  The board then voted unanimously to accept those ballots and update the count -- and the board is majority Republican.

The State Board of Elections issued a clarifying rule to Fairfax County to adjust its handling of provisional ballots in line with state law, saying that voters had to be physically present if they wanted additional testimony on their behalf to be heard for why their provisional ballot The county then extended its deadline for voters to come in and represent themselves.  (Note that provisionals can be accepted without the voter present and often are, contra some bad info going around the Twitterverse)

These sorts of things happen in every election, but usually  the margin is wide enough where finding the occasional extra paper ballot doesn't matter. Here it does. A lot.

That doesn't mean that the U.S elections system couldn't use massive improvements in access and reliability, but this particular election shows that most elections officials strive to be transparent, and scrupulous in how they administer the machinery of democracy.

Herring is now up by 117 votes -- out of 2.2 million cast.

For a run-down, follow the twitter feed of Dave Wasserman (of the Cook Political Report) and Max Smith of WTOP.

Political Cues and Stealth Campaigns, or "How we elected a complete wackaloon to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees"

And just when I thought that local Houston elections had gone reasonably well in the "let's not embarrass ourselves in front of the country" metric,  I find out that Dave Wilson, a noted anti-LGBT activist, busybody and general slime ball who makes a living as an infected boil on the body politic, beat a respected incumbent on the Houston Community College Board of Trustees. Great.

Via the ever-handy Charles Kuffner  (criticizing the Houston Chronicle's coverage):

So a 24-year incumbent gets ousted in a race decided by 26 votes, and what do we learn about his victorious opponent? Just that he’s a “small-business owner”. Not that he’s a notorious, longtime anti-gay activist who ran against Mayor Parker in 2011 and is currently embroiled in a legal battle against the Harris County Democratic Party over his attempts to run for County Commissioner while claiming his business address as his residence. Not the fact that he meddled in the HCC 1 race by sending one of his patented attack mailers, sliming Zeph Capo and Kevin Hoffman for being gay. Not the fact that the mail he sent on his own behalf would make you think he himself was African-American, which he is not. Just, you know, a “small-business owner”. Nothing to see here, folks.

 Incidentally, Kuffner entitled his post "Why Stealth Campaigns can Work," which is a great statement about the political science behind how Wilson got elected.

In crowded, low-profile local races on ballots with lots of items, information is at a premium. Voters don't have time to extensively investigate every race, so they rely on cues. (Political Party is an example). What Wilson did was pretend he was black to get a heavily African-American community to identify with him. In effect, he scrambled the cue to voters in order to mislead them.

It's the same principal that helped unscrupulous petition gathers get Michigan's notorious 2006 Proposition 2, the so-called "Michigan Civil Rights Initiative" that banned affirmative action, on the ballot. Canvassers would go door-to-door in African American neighborhoods and tell them to sign up to support civil rights.

It's also the same reason why "Right-to-Work" or "Freedom-to-Work" campaigns are so lethal. Their proponents cloak anti-worker union-busting laws in pro-worker language to camouflage their true intent.

Guess I won't be teaching at HCC anytime soon. 

And Kuffner's criticism of the Chronicle here is spot on. By not even mentioning Wilson's past or tactics and identifying him merely as a "small business owner" they actively aid his deception. Of course, it's often tough for reporters -- especially new ones, and I've been there -- to know the history of local politicians, but some one in the editorial chain should have caught this one.

For more on cues, how voters use them and how political operatives use false rhetoric to hide them, check out the work of political scientists Arthur Lupia and Matt McCubbins. Or read George Orwell.

On the bright side,  Wilson has never claimed to be Santa Claus. Clearing that bar means he's at least marginally better than at least one congressman I could name.

Virginia Attorney General Barn Burner & hilarious hashtags

Lost a bit in the brouhaha over the narrow victory for Terry McAuliffe in Tuesday's Virginia gubernatorial election is the incredibly close race in the state's attorney general race -- an office the Democrats haven't controlled in several decades.

Republican Mark Obenshain ran out to a lead of 60,000 votes early on Democrat Mark Herring then watched the lead dwindle to nearly nothing as the later-reporting Democratic areas of northern Virginia and urban Virginia weighed in.

Currently, Obenshain leads Herring by 55 votes (out of more than 2.2 million cast) according to the Virgina State Board of Elections. However, the Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman has identified several discrepancies in Richmond precinct canvassing totals that will flip that margin in favor of Herring by 82 votes. Seriously, this guy knows more about ballot-counting jujitsu than... well, he knows a lot. You should follow him.

All absentee ballots are in. Most provisional ballots have been reported, except in a few small rural counties (which will favor Obenshain) and 494 in Fairfax, (which will likely favor Herring). The question is how many of those ballots will actually count, considering a recent rule clarification by the state elections board that will make it somewhat more difficult for voters to get their ballots to count.

This one is headed for a recount, folks, as a single tallying error could easily flip the race (and several already have).

If nothing else, the race has given us one of the most unintentionally funny Twitter hashtags in a long time. Considering the obsessive focus of the current Virginia AG, Ken Cuccinelli, on reproductive issues, however, the #VAAG tag seems quite fitting.

New Texas water fund offers some risks -- but also huge opportunities

Imagine that it's January 2015 and Governor Wendy Davis announces her first major budget initiative with a speech in drought-ravaged central Texas:

"My Fellow Texans, we stand at a start of a new journey. For too long, we have failed to invest in this state's people. We have failed to invest in this state's future. We have failed to invest in jobs. We have failed to invest in common-sense conservation initiatives that wisely use our resources and protect both our economic growth and our natural environment.

Today, that all changes.

Today my administration proposes that we invest $2 billion in this state's infrastructure.Today, we propose investing $2 billion in generating jobs.  Today, we propose investing $2 billion to help our communities who and in wisely using a precious natural resource.

It's fitting -- we're taking money from our rainy day fund and helping our drought-affected and cash-strapped communities gain access to much-needed water. And $200 million of the fund is reserved for the smallest parched rural communities who need water the most yet can't afford it.

But we're not going to be merely giving water away to Fracking companies profligate users. Getting access to water is important, but using it wisely is too. That's why least $400 million of the fund is strictly reserved to finance conservation projects -- better water pipes and control systems in our cities to stop waste, more efficient drip irrigation to make our successful agricultural sector even more competitive and storage projects that reduce erosion and runoff while simultaneously recharging our groundwater supplies.

 I know I would be pretty happy with that speech.

Well, the contents of that "speech" are essentially what Proposition 6 did.  It takes $2 billion from the rainy day fund and uses it to create a revolving loan fund -- essentially an infrastructure bank -- for water projects called the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas (SWIFT).  The general principal is somewhat similar federal funds out there already. At least $400 million of SWIFT goes to conservation programs and an additional $200 million is reserved specifically for rural and agricultural conservation projects.

Follow me below the fold for details

Cincinnati Pensions: Obscure yet important ballot proposal blogging

So voters resoundingly rejected an idiotic Tea-Party backed proposal that would gut city worker pensions in Cincinnati, Ohio

Good.

Pensions do present long-term fiscal challenges to companies and governments. But one thing that drives me crazy is that we seem consider pensions, which are debts owed to existing and former workers, as expendable, while we consider debts we owe to banks and bondholders somehow non-negotiable.

If I were a cynical observer of public policy, I might suggest that this double standard in popular perception and bankruptcy law is because bankers are rich and well connected while city and school district employees tend to be of more modest means.
 
But that would mean that I wasn't a Very Serious Person.

Incidentally, it also drives me nuts when we take pension problems that were created by companies or governments not making their contributions and blame them on workers -- who usually contribute large portions of their salary to the pension fund.

I suppose I could link to recent such happenings in Detroit and Illinois, but I'm feeling lazy today.

The Costs of Voting: or "I blew it again" or "Who the heck is running for this office?"

Here's another installment in my ongoing series about the costs of voting.

So it's an off-year election here in Texas, which means local elections and statewide constitutional amendments.

For the most part, I didn't have a problem. I took about an hour to research the nine different state constitutional amendments. A few required some thought, but most were no-brainers.  The mayor's race in town was an easy choice, especially after Ben Hall decided to come out against policies that would start treating gays and lesbians like human beings.

That was probably another hour of research.

There were no school board seats up in my district, the two local bond issues were well covered and my local City Councilwoman was unopposed. 

That's another hour, but still so far so good.

And then I got to the five at-large council seats.With interviews from sites like Texpatriate, and Kuffner's, as well as candidate web sites, I was able to get enough information to make a semi-informed choice on four of five. For one, a good working relationship with Annise Parker made the decision, on another a good interview on planning issues put me over the top. For another, seeing a list of accomplishments on his Web site leaned me in his direction, while for a fourth candidate earned my vote because a local progressive had volunteered for her campaign.

This was about two hours of research.

But I STILL couldn't figure out who I wanted in one of the races.

You see, there's always one electoral race that I have no clue is coming or overlook. In Ann Arbor, it was always the local library board. There always seemed to be four people running for three slots.  Three of the candidates were usually nice, upstanding, stewards of the community -- and the fourth was a raging lunatic. The problem was that I could never suss out the lunatic and information was usually thin on the ground.

And so I -- a guy who has either covered or studied politics for a living for the past 15 years -- still have not filled out a complete November ballot in my life.

Also, even after five hours of research,  note how many of my choices were made by cues and vague impressions and not necessarily carefully considered information.

The costs of voting are real -- and that's even without my having any problems with ID, or having to wait in line at my conveniently located rich-neighborhood well-run polling place.

Why I'm a liberal democrat (and a Liberal Democrat): respecting the rules of the game, election day edition

Permit me to open with a personal story.

About a decade ago, I was running a small weekly newspaper in upstate New York’s Wayne County. One day, I ran across an item in the neighboring town’s paper describing some complaints some fine upstanding citizens made at a school board meeting about the annual district budget vote (which had passed).

One of the residents, a woman named Penny Frederick, complained that officials weren’t vigorously checking voter eligibility of what appeared to be “high school students” in front of her.

That seemed a bit discriminatory, and raised my hackles – after all, 18-year-olds can vote, right? She then went on to suggest that voters should need to go through a “qualifying” process, which set me growling audibly in my office.

She then said the following:

"We believe that if school were not in session, there would be next to no students voting. We believe that students were excused from class to vote. What a shame that students who do not pay taxes are encouraged and frightened into voting for more spending."

Let that sink in for a few moments.

It sounds really similar to another rather infamous recent pronouncement, doesn’t it?

At the time, I wrote a furious column; pointing out that A. Ms. Frederick had no evidence that students were intimidated into voting for the budget and B. whatever stance they took was a moot point as 18-year-olds are entitled to the same voting rights as anyone else under the 26^th amendment of the Constitution. It’s a close cousin to the 15^th and 19^th amendments, which set the same parameters for race and gender. And oh yeah, you don’t have to own property or have tax liability to vote -- that’s the 24^th amendment, which dispatches with those pesky poll taxes.

(The column appeared in the July 8, 2004 edition of the Wayne County Mail, which is, alas, not online)

One thing that we emphasize in political science is the “rules of the game.” That is, in order to have a stable democratic government, we can disagree on policy, but we need to respect certain parameters: universal suffrage and other civil rights on one hand, and the legitimacy of duly elected office-holders or governments on the other.

It’s arguments like Frederick's that frighten me about the future of democracy in the United States, because they drip with contempt for the rules of the game. They think if you’re young, you’re too stupid to vote. They think if you receive welfare payments or don’t pay income taxes, you have too much of a conflict of interest to vote (Senior citizens who rely on Social Security or CEOs who take advantage of corporate tax breaks always seem to be exempt from this requirement, though). They think if you don’t have a driver’s license, you can’t be trusted to vote. They think if you’re a convicted felon, you don’t deserve to vote. In practice, all of these requirements seem to count double for the poor, for females, and for racial and sexual minorities.

We’ve seen these arguments come to a head over the last five years: the bizarre fixation on our president’s citizenship; the attack on community organizing groups like ACORN; the unprecedented obstruction of routine executive appointments to the cabinet, regulatory agencies and the court system; and the spread of voter disenfranchisement laws.

But as the statements I encountered above show, the sentiment isn’t new.  I discovered mild symptoms nine years ago in an upstate New York school budget election. But much more dangerous strains showed up in the hard-right reaction to Clinton’s presidency, the John Birch Society and the Jim Crow southern segregationists, and the pre-Civil War slaveholders, who plunged the country into Civil War rather than give up power to own their fellow human beings.

  

Fortunately, thus far, we’ve always had just enough citizens and leaders who have pushed back on these claims – radical Republicans during the Civil War, Liberal Democrats during the New Deal and Great Society, socialist labor organizers, populist farm organizers, and activists for any number of important civil rights causes.

Look, I’m a Liberal Democrat (capital letters) because I believe in a set of public policy goals: a well-run government, a clean environment, a fair shake for workers, universal access to quality health care, education, child care and employment, a constructive foreign policy, a fair tax system, and equal protections for all regardless of gender, race or orientation.

But more fundamentally, I’m also a liberal democrat (lower-case letters) because I believe in the rules of the game: the legitimacy of elected leaders and in the legitimacy of all citizens to choose those leaders and take part in the governing process.

Making some people (by which I mean "those people") jump through ridiculous hoops to vote is an affront to the rules of the game.

Participatory democracy is a fragile thing.  One of our goals as progressives (and Progressives) is to cherish it by making sure all citizens have the real right to participate in it. 

We can do better. We must do better. And that Journey starts on Election Day -- though it most certainly cannot stop there.

Reconsidering the "Lazy progressive voter" crutch

Noah Horwitz over at Texpatriate has been beating the drum recently about how Democratic voters need to turn out in midterm elections.

That's a perfectly legitimate stance -- fall off in Democratic turnout helps dooms progressives in mid-term elections.

But where we part ways (at least partially) is their description of "lazy" voters.

Turnout is a two way phenomenon -- people have to get up and vote. They have to be interested and be invested. This is true.

However, we need to remember the other side of turnout are the costs of voting. Registration takes time. You can't take off work. You can't get child care. There's a line out the door at your polling place. You have to get the proper IDs -- which entail more standing in line and more missing work you can't afford to miss.

And the major thing that limits the cost of voting in mobilization -- and how good were progressive mobilization efforts in a place like Texas in 2010 (in a few places, quite good, in most others, not so much)?

So when we talk about "lazy voters" we need to remember the institutional hurdles we throw up to participation in this country and in this state -- both in the formal election process and in the underlying economic environment.

Breaking those chains needs to be huge part of  progressive politics over the next decade (and every decade)