So as everyone originally expected after a May primary, Jane Harman’s successor in Congress will be Los Angeles city councilwoman Janice Hahn, who defeated wealthy Tea Partier Crag Huey by about a 55-45 margin in yesterday’s special runoff.
The suspense about this race came from Huey’s unexpected second-place finish in the primary, when he edged out Democratic Secretary of State Deborah Bowen for a runoff spot. The runoff campaign was expensive and abrasive, but was nonetheless expected to culminate in a very low turnout event–the kind where anything could happen. In the end, the Democratic nature of the district trumped Huey’s money, and the exceptionally nasty “independent” campaign against Hahn that featured perhaps the most revolting web ad of all time.
Nate Silver suggests the results, while somewhat reassuring to Democrats, ought to be sobering as well:

Ms. Hahn’s 9-percentage-point margin of victory, however, is underwhelming in a district where Democrats have an 18-point registration advantage. The race had received considerably less media attention than the special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District in May, a Republican-leaning district in which Democrats also won under considerably more difficult circumstances. But in some ways it cuts against the momentum that Democrats had seemed to garner from the New York race, and serves as a reminder that retaking the House of Representatives still qualifies as an ambitious if achievable goal.

Fundamentals and trends are always important, but in the end, you have to actually have elections, and the results do not always meet expectations.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
According to received wisdom, the Christian Right is engaged in a tactical alliance with more secular-minded conservatives in the Republican Party. The pairing was established as far back as 1980, when Ronald Reagan made unambiguous support for social-conservative priorities (especially the abolition of abortion rights) GOP orthodoxy and earned the support of conservative evangelicals who had been politically mobilized and then bitterly disappointed by Jimmy Carter. The relationship has sometimes been compared to a “marriage of convenience,” and indeed, Christian Right leaders have never been reluctant to complain that they are being taken for granted and underserved by their political partners.
Given this background, one might assume that Christian Right leaders would be exceptionally nervous about the ascendancy of the Tea Party Movement, with its libertarian streak and its fixation on fiscal issues. But as it turns out, Christian Right elites, for their own peculiar reasons, have become enthusiastic participants in the drive to combat Big Government and its enablers in both parties. It’s no accident that one red-hot candidate for president, Michele Bachmann, and a much-discussed likely candidate, Rick Perry, each have one foot planted in the Christian Right and another in the Tea Party Movement. To a remarkable extent, today’s theocrats have stopped thinking of “social issues” like abortion or gay marriage as isolated from or in competition with fiscal or economic issues, and started thinking of them as part and parcel of a broader challenge that requires the radical transformation of government itself.
On an institutional level, the merger of Christian Right and Tea Party interests is remarkably advanced. The alliance has served as the very foundation stone of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the latest venture of that intrepid politico-religious entrepreneur, Ralph Reed, which has sprouted chapters in many states, most prominently Iowa, where it sponsored the first candidate forum of the 2012 cycle. There is even a term to describe this new strain of conservatism: the “Teavangelicals,” a subject of a recent broadcast by Christian Right journalist David Brody, which, among other things, examined the conservative evangelical roots of major Tea Party leaders. Most recently, a host of organizations closely connected with the Christian Right and “social issues” causes have signed onto the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge,” the Tea Party-inspired oath that demands a position on the debt limit vote that is incompatible with any bipartisan negotiations.
But this convergence between the two groups goes well beyond coalition politics and reflects a radicalization of conservative evangelical elites that is just as striking as the rise of the Tea Party itself. Indeed, the worldview of many Christian Right leaders has evolved into an understanding of government (at least under secularist management) as a satanic presence that seeks to displace God and the churches through social programs, to practice infanticide and euthanasia, to destroy parental control of children, to reward vice and punish virtue, and to thwart America’s divinely appointed destiny as a redeemer nation fighting for Christ against the world’s many infidels.
As an illustration of this phenomenon, it’s worth unpacking a few lines from a recent missive by televangelist James Robison, the convener of two recent meetings of Christian Right leaders in Texas to ponder their role in 2012, and also of a similar session back in 1979 that helped pave the way for Reagan’s conquest of conservative evangelicals. Says Robison:

There are moral absolutes. No person’s failure reduces or redefines the standards carved in stone by the finger of God and revealed in His Word. We must find a way to stop judges and courts from misinterpreting the Constitution and writing their own laws.

“Activist judges” who have developed and applied protections for abortion rights, non-discrimination, and church-state separation have long been a bugaboo for the Christian Right. But Robison appears to be extending this traditional list of evangelical grievances, adding his blessing to the Tea Party’s objection to the string of Supreme Court decisions that enabled the federal government to enact New Deal programs like Social Security that protect people afflicted by personal “failure” from the consequences of their actions. He continues:

Success and prosperity may be mishandled by some, but the potential for success that produces opportunity for all and prosperity at different levels is not the problem. Those we elect must keep the free market free, healthy and under the influence of people who understand the importance of personal responsibility.

Read more…

So in the wake of the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” signed by seven Republican presidential candidates, and the “Pro-Life Presidential Pledge” signed by five, along comes Iowa social conservative kingpin Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization with a new pledge–actually an oath–it calls “The Marriage Vow.”
You have to read this document to believe it. Styled as a “pro-family” platform, the pledge goes far beyond the usual condemnations of same-sex marriage and abortion and requires support for restrictions on divorce (hardly a federal matter), the firing of military officers who place women in forward combat roles, and “recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, [and] greater financial stability.” If that’s not enough, it also enjoins “recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.” This, in case you are wondering, is a nod to the “Full Quiver (or Quiverfull) Movement” that encourages large families in a patriarchal structure as a religious obligation, not to mention to those anti-choicers who want to ban some of the most popular forms of contraception.
The preamble to the “Marriage Vow” is even weirder, asserting among other things that “faithful monogomy” was a central preoccupation of the Founding Fathers; that slaves benefitted from stronger families than African-Americans have today; and that any claims there is a genetic basis for homosexuality are “anti-scientific.”
The “Marriage Vow” seems tailor-made to feed the backlash against ever-proliferating “pledges” imposed on Republican presidential candidates by the Right. But Vander Plaats and his group cannot be dissed without risk by anyone wanting to win the Iowa Caucuses. A perennial statewide candidate (his 2010 primary challenge to now-Gov. Terry Branstad won a surprising 41% of the vote), Vander Plaats was co-chair of Mike Huckabee’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign, and also spearheaded the successful 2010 effort to recall state Supreme Court judges who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Kevin Hall of The Iowa Republican suggests that the “Vow” is a power-play by VanderPlaats to influence the outcome of the August 13 Iowa State GOP straw poll, in which The Family Leader has pledged neutrality, by separating candidates deemed acceptable from those who won’t sign the oath. And indeed, Michele Bachmann, rumored to be Vander Plaats’ current favorite, signed it virtually before the ink dried. What will really be interesting is whether Tim Pawlenty, who has been eagerly accepting every ideological demand made of him by the Right, signs this document. It is certainly designed to freak out the more secular-minded Establishment Republicans he will eventually need if he is to put together a winning coalition of everyone in the party who doesn’t like Mitt Romney. But he has to do well in Iowa for that to matter, so my guess is that he will follow Bachmann in kissing Vander Plaats’ ring and associating himself with a fresh batch of extremism.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the civics-book perspective on the American political system, presidential elections help make government work. They allow nominees to set a national agenda for the two major parties that transcend the regional differences and messy constituency-tending that so often occurs in Congress. And they pull the parties towards the political center, where swing voters live and bipartisanship thrives. This is made even more likely by occasions where you happen to have two candidates–say, an incumbent president and a challenger who is either a consensus nominee or a party leader in Congress–with a stake in successful governance and an eye trained on the general election. But the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest is showing the flip-side of that proposition: In a highly competitive primary field where most of the candidates are not in federal office, and all are campaigning avidly against “Washington,” they are not exerting pressure on the party and its representatives in Congress to move towards “the center,” and, in many cases, they are pushing in the opposite direction.
The preeminent example of this dangerous feedback loop between the GOP presidential candidates and Republicans in Washington is the ongoing stalemate over the budget and the debt limit. The maximalist conservative position on the issue, called the “cut, cap and balance” pledge, was originally staked out by the House Study Committee and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. Designed to create an air-tight formula against any compromise with Democrats on the debt limit, the pledge includes two different methods for permanently limiting federal spending to a drastically lower percentage of GDP than currently prevails, a California-style constitutional provision requiring a super-majority for any tax increases, and a demand for immediate spending cuts beyond anything ever seriously discussed in Congress. Despite the fact that the pledge originated with extremists in Congress, nearly all the presidential candidates rushed to attach their names to it. As it stands, no fewer than six of them, including supposed “moderate” Mitt Romney, have signed on. Other than Jon Huntsman, the only holdout is Michele Bachmann, who is trying to stake out a position to the right of “cut, cap and balance” by making repeal of ObamaCare a precondition for any debt limit increase or budget deal.
What began as a fringe pledge, in other words, was soon elevated to Republican orthodoxy by the embrace it received from GOP presidential candidates competing to claim the “true conservative” mantle. In this way, Republican ultras in Congress are successfully using the presidential field to increase pressure on their own leadership to abandon negotiations with the White House and congressional Democrats. And with the Iowa Caucuses dominated by hard-core conservatives, and Senator DeMint standing astride next year’s all-important South Carolina presidential primary, it’s no surprise the strategy is working.
This upward ratcheting of pressure is also illustrated by yet another “pledge” recently demanded of presidential candidates by the upstart anti-abortion group, the Susan B. Anthony List. Breathtaking in its scope, the SBA pledge involves a commitment to appoint only certified “pro-life” figures to specific federal cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, support for sweeping bans on federal funding for any entity or contractor involved in entirely legal abortion services, and an agreement to promote and sign a federal version of the “fetal pain” bills, which ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in defiance of past Supreme Court decisions, that are currently being enacted in several states. Confronted by the pledge, all but two presidential candidates–Mitt Romney and Herman Cain–promptly signed it, and the holdouts hastened to express their firm support for the complete abolition of abortion rights. The Republican line on abortion had once again shifted even further right, if possible, from where it had been before.
Finally, the GOP candidates’ reluctant embrace of Paul Ryan’s radical proposals to end Medicare as we know it has ensured that the contours of Ryan’s unpopular plan will continue to hold sway over the Republican Party going into 2012. Initially, the candidates cast a wary eye towards Ryan’s plan, even as nearly all House Republicans (and later Senate Republicans) voted for it. While praising the Wisconsin representative and making vague noises about their own determination to control entitlement spending, the candidates preserved their right to issue their own proposals in good time. But then Newt Gingrich spoiled the game by openly criticizing Ryan’s treatment of Medicare as “right-wing social engineering” that hadn’t a chance at public support, and in the ensuing furor the stampede began. One by one, Republican candidates, including a chastened Gingrich, lined up in support of Ryan’s entire budget, thereby making a virtual abolition of Medicare a party-wide stance that Republicans now cannot possibly hope to live down. (Indeed, the desire to obtain bipartisan cover for radical changes to Medicare is probably the only factor other than Wall Street pressure that is keeping alive congressional Republican interest in a budget deal with Obama).
It’s an open question whether Republican candidates are concerned about, or even aware of, the risks they are running by colluding in their party’s ideological bender, both in terms of their chances in the general election and in seeking to serve as president if elected. Mitt Romney, who is in the anomalous position of being transformed from the true conservative champion of 2008 to today’s moderate establishment candidate, even as he has become tangibly more conservative on the issues, probably understands it. But most conservatives appear convinced that 2012 will be a referendum on Barack Obama and the general direction of the country–one that Republicans can’t lose as long as their base turns out. And in the meantime, the complicity of the GOP presidential candidates in right-wing efforts to “stiffen the spine” of Republican officeholders against the temptations of bipartisan governance is contributing to genuine risks for the country.

At TNR today, Jonathan Chait asks an important and very basic question: in doing things like supporting radical cuts in federal transportation spending, are Republicans actually expressing their vision of what the federal government should or shouldn’t do?

Do they think we’re overinvested in infrastructure? That if we reduce government involvement, the private sector will step in? Or that the economic benefits of maintaining our physical infrastructure — or, more realistically, falling behind at a slower pace — are simply smaller than the economic benefits of keeping taxes low?

There is, I suspect, no one answer. Some conservatives have very radical ideas about legitimate areas of, or levels for, federal involvement in this or domestic function. Others don’t. But particularly when the president is a Democrat, and they don’t have genuine control of Congress, they feel no particular compunction to vote in a way that reflects any honest plan for the country. Domestic spending is too high, so votes to cut it, however nonsensical when it comes to an coherent view of federal responsibility, are always the right thing to do.
The same pattern is even more apparent on issues like health care. Do Republicans all share the view that health care isn’t enumerated as a federal responsibility in the Constitution and therefore any federal health care program is illegitimate? No, and the ones who do are unlikely to talk about it in public. Do all the others reject the idea that universal access to health care is a worthy and legitimate public goal? That’s harder to say, though it was certainly fashionable pretty recently for Republicans to claim they had plans to achieve something like universal coverage, even if the details made the claim highly questionable.
But what all Republicans can agree on is that Democratic efforts to achieve universal health coverage, even if they are based on plans embraced by Republicans in the not-too-distant past, are terrible and need to be repealed immediately. As noted in my previous post, Republicans seem to feel little if any responsibility to outline what they’d do the day after ObamaCare is discarded.
Finally, there’s the Big Bertha of domestic policy disputes, the demand by conservatives for radical changes to Medicare, Medicaid and (more muted, at the moment at least) Social Security. Again, some conservatives clearly think the whole New Deal/Great Society legacy was fundamentally misbegotten and unconstitutional. Others (viz. Mitch Daniels) won’t say that, but will say these programs are inappropriate and unaffordable going forward. And still others claim that initiatives to radically reduce “entitlement” benefits (via a Medicaid block grant, Medicare vouchers, or Social Security privatization) are the only way to “save” these programs. Still, conservatives are more than willing to come together in support of proposals like Paul Ryan’s budget that get them part of the way or all the way towards their ultimate objectives.
So the question remains: does it really matter what conservatives really want in the way of ideal policies? Yes and no. Where conservatives are, as in the case of politicians like Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint, among others, demonstrably in the grip of radical ideologies that are designed to produce a country characterized by theocracy, contempt for people in need, unfettered corporate power, and rampant militarism, then of course, progressives should make that clear. And where conservatives are demonstrably dishonest about their intentions, as with many “right-to-life” activists who weep crocodile tears for the “victims” of late-term abortions in the service of an agenda aimed at a total repeal of reproductive rights, including the use of many forms of contraception–progressives should expose the charade early and often. It’s also important to reveal what’s happening when Republican pols, whether or not they believe much of anything at all, choose to embrace the policies (or accept the litmus tests) of radicals strictly in order to achieve political power.
Beyond that, it’s probably a waste of time to worry too much about what conservatives actually want. It’s better to focus on showing what their polices would actually produce in real-world consequences. That’s bad enough.

There’s a useful article by Jennifer Haberkorn up at Politico today about the sudden demise of congressional activity on the GOP’s supposed top priority of “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act. And while there’s a lot of talk about the Democratic Senate representing an absolute bar to action on this topic, it’s also clear Republicans aren’t exactly united on either the “repeal” or “replace” agenda, as Michele Bachmann’s BFF Steve King makes plain:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of the House’s most ardent supporters of repealing or defunding the law at all costs, says it has become more difficult to get the attention of House leaders.
“I can’t get any traction,” he said of his effort to repeal or defund the law. “You can’t create something in this Congress unless leadership approves it.”
He questioned whether Republican leaders are willing to repeal the whole law if it means also repealing some of its popular provisions.
“There’s a little bit of an undercurrent that I pick up among well-positioned people in this Congress who think there could be some redeeming qualities of Obamacare,” pointing to statements Republican leadership have made in support of a handful of the law’s policies, such as banning insurers from denying patients because of preexisting conditions or allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance through age 26.

This “undercurrent” is more obvious in the reluctance of Republicans to embrace any sort of coherent plan for dealing with the health care system generally. Yes, most of them support an agenda with common features, including medical malpractice “reform,” interstate sales of insurance policies, replacement of the deduction for employer-sponsored health care with an individual tax credit, and high-risk “pools” for the uninsured, all accompanied by some strategy for privatizing Medicare and dumping Medicaid on the states. But few Republicans want to come to grips with a clear commitment on federal, or indeed public, responsibility for affordable health care. That’s probably because the ascendant forces in the conservative movement frankly think of health care as a consumer service like any other, which the government has no real business (and the federal government has no constitutional authority) to be involved in.
So it’s tough to get intra-Republican agreement on a “replacement” system, and that in turn makes “repeal” a tough sell politically, and would so even if Republicans had the votes to pull it off.
And it’s easier, of course, to be all things to all voters, posing simultaneously as the defenders of the status quo on issues like Medicare benefits and physicians’ prerogatives, even as they plan radical steps to decimate Medicare and go back to a 1950s model of health care as primarily an individual responsibility to be paid for out-of-pocket, without insurance at all.
Democrats have a continuing responsibility to smoke them out on all these contradictions.

In an earlier post today, J.P. Green noted that one of the Beltway’s most durable curse-on-both-houses “centrist” pundits, WaPo’s Richard Cohen, has gotten volubly fed up with today’s Republican Party. More remarkably, the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who has actually been something of a cheerleader for the GOP throughout his journalistic career, went around the bend today and denounced the negotiating posture of congressional Republicans on the debt limit as reflecting a party that “may no longer be a normal party.”

Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it….
If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.

This is really something, coming from Brooks, who often soars above the partisan fray like an eagle, but then eventually finds his way back to the tactical positions of the GOP like a homing pigeon. Now he’s basically saying the inmates have taken over the asylum, and predictably, he’s getting pounded by the conservative commentariat for his pains.
Brooks could be the proverbial mine canary in terms of MSM perceptions of who is and who isn’t being “reasonable” in Washington right now. That won’t directly affect the actual struggle for power, but it would be nice for a change to see that the ability of the Right to shift the “center” simply by escalating its demands is not infinite.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Michele Bachmann really wants you to know she’s a “constitutional conservative.” The term is featured prominently on her web ads. She mentioned it three times in her announcement speech. It’s in the first sentence of her official bio. But what exactly does it mean? While the term can signify different things to different people, it turns out it’s especially important to Bachmann. As a candidate who doesn’t want to get confined to a social conservative ghetto in an election year that is revolving around fiscal and economic issues–and as someone with a well-earned reputation for extremism–her strong “constitutional conservative” stance indicates, but only to those who are trained to listen, a decidedly radical agenda that is at least as congenial to rabid social conservatives as it is to property-rights absolutists or anti-tax zealots. In short, it enables her to run as a middle-of-the-road conservative who just wants to get rid of ObamaCare and balance the budget, even as she lets the initiated know she has other, more ambitious, plans for the country.
Despite the growing ubiquity of the “constitutional conservative” identifier in the Tea Party movement and the right-wing blogosphere, there’s no authorized definition of the term and some who proudly wear the label doubtless disagree about its meaning. Adam J. White of the Weekly Standard attributes its recent emergence to an influential 2009 essay in the Wall Street Journal by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz. The Berkowitz formulation did indeed focus on the need for Republicans to return to first principles, with “the constitutional order” providing the key optic. But he also called “moderation” in the pursuit of liberty an essential constitutional concept, which is not a term one would normally associate with Michele Bachmann or Constitution-brandishing Tea Party activists.
Among this crowd, it more commonly connotes an allegiance to a set of fixed–eternally fixed, for the more religiously inclined–ideas of how government should operate in every field. Constitutional conservatives want to distinguish themselves from the more tradition-bound type of conservatives who adapt to changing social and economic needs and, for that matter, to the perceived wants and needs of the populace. They rarely come right out and denounce democracy, of course, but it’s clear they think their liberties are endangered by people who, say, would like government-guaranteed access to affordable health care.
Conservative polemicist and radio host Mark Levin offered an exceptionally clear explanation of the connection between this kind of affinity for the Constitution as the sum of political wisdom and a degree of hostility to democracy:

[F]or the Founding Fathers, individual liberty was not possible without private property rights. For the Founding Fathers, the only legitimate government was not only one that was instituted with the consent of the people, but one that would preserve and protect the individual’s right to property. Jefferson talked about it, talked about ‘tyranny of the legislature.’ So the consent of the governed is only part of it.

Levin’s words are an appropriate reminder that constitutional conservatives think of America as a sort of ruined paradise, bestowed a perfect form of government by its wise Founders but gradually imperiled by the looting impulses of voters and politicians. In their backwards-looking vision, constitutional conservatives like to talk about the inalienable rights conferred by the Founders–not specifically in the Constitution, as a matter of fact, but in the Declaration of Independence, which is frequently and intentionally conflated with the Constitution as the part of the Founders’ design. It’s from the Declaration, for instance, that today’s conservatives derive their belief that “natural rights” (often interpreted to include quasi-absolute property rights or the prerogatives of the traditional family), as well as the “rights of the unborn,” were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin.
This Restorationist character of constitutional conservatism was nicely captured by The Economist‘s pseudonymous American reporter w.w. in a commentary on Bachmann’s Iowa launch event:

[I]f one bothers to really think about it, constitutional conservativism, as construed by Ms Bachmann and her boosters, might be better labeled “constitutional restorationism”, which I think more clearly conveys the idea of a return to the system of government laid out in the constitution, interpreted as the authors intended. But this idea, if taken really seriously, is staggeringly radical.

No kidding. But that’s where the dog whistle aspect of calling yourself a constitutional conservative comes into play. The obvious utility of the label is that it hints at a far more radical agenda than meets the untrained eye, all the while elevating the proud bearer above the factional disputes of the conservative movement’s economic and cultural factions.

Read more…

I’ve celebrated quite a few Independence Days, but this is the first where I have a palpable sense that a political faction is making a powerful claim to own the holiday and the Declaration of Independence at everyone else’s expense. Perhaps it should have been plain from the very beginning of the Tea Party movement that it involved a lot of fairly privileged people who thought others were trying to ruin “their” country by advocating “un-American” idea like universal access to private health insurance. But this July 4, the idea that the Founders would all be out there today campaigning avidly for right-wing causes and candidates seems to be an article of faith for many conservatives. For a good example of the interpretation of the Declaration that holds the unique purpose of this country is to let individuals accumulate vast personal wealth and then stockpile shooting irons to protect it, you can read the latest essay of Victor Davis Hanson, a writer who is often wrong but never, ever in doubt.
E.J. Dionne responds to this line of argument for those that conservatives would exclude from the national holiday:

We need to recognize the deep flaws in this vision of our present and our past. A reading of the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our forebears were not revolting against taxes as such — and most certainly not against government as such.
In the long list of “abuses and usurpations” the Declaration documents, taxes don’t come up until the 17th item, and that item is neither a complaint about tax rates nor an objection to the idea of taxation. Our Founders remonstrated against the British crown “for imposing taxes on us without our consent.” They were concerned about “consent,” i.e. popular rule, not taxes.
The very first item on their list condemned the king because he “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Note that the signers wanted to pass laws, not repeal them, and they began by speaking of “the public good,” not about individuals or “the private sector.” They knew that it takes public action — including effective and responsive government — to secure “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It’s fine to have this sort of perennial debate over the ultimate meaning of documents like the Declaration of Independence. But you can’t have a debate when one side is convinced it not only represents the sole correct point of view, but the only people who can be considered true Americans who love their country. You’d think, in fact, that the growing, angry disdain conservatives have for roughly half the population of the United States would make them feel a bit more doubt about their own patriotism towards America as it actually is. Truth is rarely as self-evident as the self-righteous often believe.

Fiscal Year 2012 begins today in 46 of the 50 states. In Minnesota, state government has been shut down as Republican legislators demand new cuts in health and human services spending and oppose Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton’s proposal for a millionaire’s tax. 24 of the 32 states that have enacted FY 2012 budget have imposed significant budget cuts. A total of 42 states still face budget shortfalls in the new fiscal year, in amounts totaling $103 billion. And federal economic stimulus assistance to the states ended yesterday, for the most part.
That’s the good news from the states. The bad news is that almost any plausible scenario for breaking the budget deadlock at the federal level is likely to involve serious cuts–and perhaps unprecedented cuts–in funding for federal-state programs. For the biggest of these programs, Medicaid, Republicans want to end its entitlement status and simply give states a smaller chuck of cash and let them figure out how to provide health care to the poor and disabled. Even Democrats are talking about significant reductions in the federal match rate for Medicaid.
The dirty little secret of American government is that the feds really don’t deliver that many services. More often, they help finance services delivered by state and local governments. This arrangement makes it easier for fiscal hawks to remove themselves a step or two from the consequences of their actions. I doubt if more than a handful of the Republican Members of Congress who are threatening to plunge the national and even the global economy into chaos if their budget-cutting demands aren’t met are paying any formal attention to this unhappy fiscal new year in the states, which they’ve longed for and hope to make far worse.