David Trinh

This article from the Star Tribune provides a great example of why it’s bad to write policy into constitutions.  Essentially, Minnesota passed a “Legacy Amendment” in 2008 that dedicated a portion of the state’s sales tax revenue to projects concerning the arts and the environment.  While the amendment was certainly well meaning—what self-respecting liberal doesn’t like clean water, parks and orchestras?—it has  created a whole host of problems for lawmakers who are trying to pare down a gigantic budget deficit without slashing programs that provide things like healthcare for homeless people.

While we might all like to have more parks and art museums, I think we can all agree that it’s probably better to prioritize saving peoples’ lives over trail maintenance.  When well-meaning citizens write spending policy into the state constitution they prevent well-meaning legislators from effectively triaging during an economic downturn.  Any constitutional amendment which mandates specific levels of spending or a particular program, be it a liberal Legacy Amendment or Pawlenty’s ill-conceived budgeting amendment, should be kept off the books.

I’m generally not such a fan, but Governor Pawlenty is right about this:

Gov. Pawlenty cut $1.9 million in state ethanol producer payments. From his detailed budget proposal (emphasis mine):

This proposal reduces the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) program and grant spending by 6.7 percent. The largest reduction is a one-time decrease in ethanol producer payments ($1.931 million), with the remainder making up reductions in grants to county fairs, livestock breeders, agricultural research and education organizations and Second Harvest Heartland. Mental health grants, farm-to-school grants, livestock investment grants and MDA’s dairy development and profitability enhancement program are also reduced.

Hear, hear.  These programs deserve much more than a one-time decrease but this cut is better than nothing.  Polinaut notes that this probably won’t gain Pawlenty many accolades in Iowa, but hey, if Arnie Vinick can win the Republican nomination after taking a strong stance against such a foolish policy, I’m sure Pawlenty has a fighting chance to do so as well.

People are real dumb:

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007…

The study, a joint project of Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, also found that most Americans believe that colleges could admit a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices, and that colleges could spend less and maintain a high quality of education.

This is bizarre.  If colleges really cared more about their bottom lines than educational outcomes, presumably they would leap at an opportunity to admit more students—especially if the marginal cost of each extra student was so low that they could do so without lowering quality or raising prices.  There are a lot of people out there that need to take an intro econ course.

That said it’s worth noting that American universities consistently top the charts as the world’s best educational institutions.  It’s possible some of these lists might be a little busted but you can’t deny that American colleges and universities do most of the world’s leading research and are the most desired places of study for most of the world’s population.  Gotta think we’re doing something right.

Collin Peterson is at it again, via the Wonkroom:

Speaking before a gathering of coal-powered executives, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) announced Tuesday that he, Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO) were introducing yet another piece of legislation to roll back Clean Air Act action on global warming pollution. Skelton’s Dirty Air Act comes on the heels of similar legislation by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Rep. Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND). At the Missouri Rural Electric Cooperative State Legislative Conference, Skelton argued that because Congressional action on climate has “stalled” in the Senate, he “cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats” at the Environmental Protection Agency:

It goes without saying that this is terrible policy; real environmental damage is going to occur because Peterson has decided once again to sell out to the energy industry.  The puzzling thing about this deal though, is that it’s largely unclear what Collin Peterson stands to gain by helping out the coal industry.  The 7^th isn’t exactly coal country, so I can only assume that there’s some sort of backroom deal here between Peterson and coal lobby.  I wouldn’t be surprised if next time there’s some sort of movement to make the true environmental consequences of ethanol known that big coal and their allies in Congress will step in to block this change.

On a different note, I have to say that Skelton is actually right on one thing: the institutional failures in the Senate have begun devolving a bit too much power to unelected portions of our government.  I’m all for more stringent environmental regulations but it really would be nice if they were codified into law instead of being subject to the whim of bureaucrats inside the EPA.  Everything’s all well and good now, but when the Republicans eventually take power, these will undoubtedly be some of the first rules to go.  Sure would be nice if we could entrench them with some sort of statute and provide some stable rules that businesses could plan around.

Fresh off of new polling that Rep. Mark Kirk is leading Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias in the race for President Obama’s former Senate seat comes even more devastating news for Illinois Democrats:

Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL) has now declared that the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, businessman Scott Lee Cohen, should consider withdrawing from the race in the wake of publicity surrounding a 2005 arrest for domestic violence…

The big problem Quinn has here is that while Cohen is technically his “running mate,” in the sense that they will be listed together on the general election ballot in the same way that we vote for president and vice president, Quinn did not pick him. Candidates for governor and lieutenant governor in Illinois are nominated in separate primaries, but then run together as a ticket.

I have to say, the system that Illinois uses to select lieutenant governors is completely insane.  It’s one thing to expect people to actually pay attention to a down-ballot race for an office that has little-to-no real power, but if you’re going to insist that the people select the candidates individually in the primary, you should probably let them make the same choice during the general election.  These sort of mandated shotgun political weddings are a disaster in governance waiting to happen.

On a broader note, I think this story only emphasizes an element of American democracy that Matt Yglesias is rightly fond of harping on—namely the fact that our electoral system forces voters to select way too many candidates.  The fact that Scott Cohen was able to slip through the scrutiny of the media and the voters to earn a spot on the ballot line of a major party to potentially become the Lt. Governor of the nation’s fifth most populace state is absolutely astounding.

It’s not like Illinois voters are particularly inept either.  This sort of miscarriage of democracy happens all the time.  My favorite example from Minnesotan politics is the 1994 Attorney General’s race when Sharon Anderson, a very crazy self-proclaimed witch and pagan worshipper, managed to win the Republican primary.  Republicans ended up having to endorse the Democratic nominee; I’m a pretty partisan Democrat, but I’ll concede that the process was hurt by a lack of real electoral competition for the office.

Voters don’t want to make these types of terrible choices but when they’re forced to choose candidates for upwards of sixteen different offices, they prioritize some races and vote solely on the basis of Scandinavian last names in others.   This is a bad way to run a democracy and until we fix it we’re going to keep seeing more Scott Cohens and Sharon Andersons.