ADVENTURES in FEDERALISM by Lou Cannon, Author, President Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime
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ADVENTURES IN FEDERALISM By Lou Cannon, author, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime --Speech to NCSL leadership conference in San Francisco, Nov. 6, 2009. It’s good to be here. You are all in political life, and no doubt whenever you give a speech, you also say, “It’s good to be here.” That usually works. One time it didn’t was in 1972, when George McGovern was the Democratic nominee for president, and Sargent Shriver was his running mate after the jettisoning of Sen. Eagleton. Sarge, one of the nicest people I’ve ever known, came into a Texas town where there was supposed to be an audience of a hundred or so. But Texas wasn’t McGovern’s base, or Shriver’s for that matter, and fewer people turned out than are in this room. Sarge got up on a peach box, looked at the tiny crowd, and said. “I’m great to be here.” Well, it IS very good to be at an event sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures. I write a monthly column for State Net Capitol Journal, and I’m often on the phone to NCSL asking for information. All of us at State Net swear by Corina Eckl on economic issues. When it comes to politics we turn to Tim Storey. Charlie Cook, perhaps the nation’s premier political analyst, says that if there weren’t a Tim Storey we’d have to invent one. But I must say to Tim that the description of my assignment here is daunting. If I knew how to meet the “unprecedented challenges confronting legislative leaders today,” as the NCSL agenda promises, I’d bottle the solution and we could all live happily ever after. The truth is that you in this audience know more about meeting these challenges than I do, for you confront them every day. You can say, with Theodore Roosevelt, “It is not 1 the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again…who spends himself in a worthy cause…and who at the worst, if he fails, while daring greatly.” Now, Mr. Roosevelt, like the rest of us, needed an editor, and I have tightened this sentence, which goes on and on. If he were speaking today, as much as he celebrated the virtues of masculinity, he would necessarily have to speak of the men and WOMEN in the arena, including several who are here today. My role is different than yours. The great political reporter David Broder, my mentor at The Washington Post, once wrote that on every campaign bus there’s a reporter who thinks he could do a better job of running the campaign than the campaign manager and a political aide who’s certain that he could write better stories than the reporters covering his candidate. Almost certainly, Broder wrote, both of them are wrong. It’s much the same when it comes to legislating. During the past half century I’ve covered city councils, the California Legislature, Congress and the presidency as well as countless political campaigns the Rodney King trials, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the Oakland fires and numerous other natural and man-made catastrophes. Some of the public officials I covered were first-rate and some weren’t, but either way I never wanted to be them. My goal has been to provide readers-- newspaper readers at first and later book readers—with as comprehensive accounts as possible of what was happening, trying to get the facts and analyze them within deadline constraints. After more than a half century. I’m still trying. 2 Today, I’m going to try to bring historical perspective to the challenges you face. First, we’ll discuss the role of the states. What have they been able to accomplish and can states still lead while trying to cope the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression? Second, I’ll examine elements of political leadership as I observed them in the governance and style of Ronald Reagan and Jesse Unruh. Can these be replicated? And third, I’ll touch on the plight of politics today. This is supposed to be a conversation, so I’ll leave time for your questions and comments. If you don’t have any, as Reagan used to say, I’ll just keep talking. In writing my columns on the states for State Net Capitol Journal I’ve taken inspiration from in the insights of Louis Brandeis, the distinguished Supreme Court justice. In an off-cited dissenting opinion issued during the Depression, Brandeis defended the authority of states to experiment with “economic practices and institutions to meet changing social needs.” He said: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic ideas without risk to the rest of the country.” Brandeis formed his views of state experimentation as a lawyer in Massachusetts, which early in the 20th century was rife with insurance scandals. Brandeis led an investigation that persuaded the state legislature to make novel reforms. Later, he advised Woodrow Wilson, who as governor of New Jersey pushed through a broad package of regulatory reforms, some of which were later emulated nationally by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 3 In our time, Massachusetts has again served as a laboratory for democracy. Both advocates and opponents of the health care bills now winding their way through Congress have had reason to consult the Massachusetts experiment in near-universal health care embodied in a bill initiated by a Republican governor and refined by a Democratic legislature. The lessons don’t run in one direction. Mass Health is costly but so are health care plans in many states that have made no effort to establish universal care. When Massachusetts enacted its plan, a conservative critic called it “a disaster in the making” and some liberals were disappointed that it contained no mandate for employers to provide health care coverage. Because of the lack of such a mandate, it was forecast that employers would drop coverage en masse. In fact, many more employers expanded coverage than dropped it. Today, 97.5 percent of Massachusetts’s residents have health care, a figure unequaled elsewhere in the United States. On the other hand, Mass Health has exposed the drastic shortage that exists in this country of primary care physicians, who make less than specialists, work longer hours, and pay high malpractice premiums. Wherever you stand on federal health reform, Massachusetts has been a valuable laboratory. Other states have also shown the way on health care issues. Rhode Island recently won an award from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for its innovative tracking of the spread of swine flu. Rhode Island was the first state to use electronic pharmacy prescription data to track swine flu among its entire population. This has implications beyond the disease itself for one of the key elements in reducing the costs of U.S. medical care is better electronic tracking and record keeping. Here in California, which has turned fiscal crisis into an art form, we recently had an innovation. As some of you 4 know, California is the only state that requires a two-thirds legislative majority both for budget approval and tax increases. This has enabled the Republican minority to block most tax increases. One of the byproducts of this two-thirds rule has been an astonishing number of budgetary gimmicks just to keep the lights on. But Democratic legislators this year proposed and Republican legislators accepted what is by any other name a tax increase—a provider fee upon general acute-care hospitals that will raise $2 billion a year. The Republicans couldn’t resist it because the hospitals themselves asked for it, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law last month. The money will be used to obtain another $2 billion in matching Medicaid funds, vital for California because it is dead last among the states when it comes to funding for Medicaid patients. So much for the medical front. Let’s take a broader look at other ways in which states have functioned as laboratories of democracy. Political scientists tend to agree that modern federalism was invented by the U.S. Constitution, specifically by the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not specifically granted to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. It’s often argued that the 10th amendment is observed in the breach. Perhaps, that’s true. But a more practical argument—and one to which I subscribe—is that federalism is often undermined by the federal government, which imposes vast new mandates on the states without providing the means to pay for them. That’s not a new development, although the practice accelerated mightily in the last half of the 20th century. States have been ill equipped to fight back against this debilitating aspect of federalism or indeed against a general drift toward centralization in Washington. There are many reasons for this. One is that the economic breakdown of the Depression and the rise of the New Deal persuaded a majority of Americans that the federal 5 government was their best guarantee of security. Another is that wars, especially World War II, necessarily enhanced the federal power.