Politics Archives - Page 38 of 82 - Progressive Policy Institute

Immigration Reform and the Growing Asian-American Vote

Posted on June 14, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The poor showing of the G.O.P. among Latino voters in 2012 is the political subtext for much of the immigration debate in Congress this week. But Republicans also consider the impact of their words and deeds on the nation’ s fastest growing demographic: Asian-American voters, who are at least as invested in the immigration issue as Latinos.

As recently as the early 1990s, many Republicans considered the Asian-American population to be a “natural constituency” for their party, given the traditionalist social views, entrepreneurial orientation, and relatively high socioeconomic status of many Asian Americans. At the time, this was borne out by vote tallies: in the three-way presidential race of 1992, George H.W. Bush received 38% of the national electorate but 55% of the Asian-American vote.

By 2012, however, Mitt Romney drew the support of just 28% of Asian Americans. In every category of age, citizenship, ethnicity, and nativity, Asian Americans (here taken to include people of Pacific Islander ancestry) now report a preference for the Democrats.

The two-decade long collapse in Republican support among Asian-American voters towards the Democrats has been ascribed to multiple causes, including the end of the Cold War, changes in the demographic composition of the Asian-American population, and broader shifts towards the Democratic party in the heavily-Asian West Coast states and Hawaii, where nearly half of Asian Americans reside. But the politics of immigration has also been key. Continue reading “Immigration Reform and the Growing Asian-American Vote” →

The History of Gubernatorial Senate Appointments

Posted on June 6, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Including yesterday’s appointment of Jeffrey Chiesa, there have been 21 gubernatorial appointments to fill U.S. Senate seats since 1993 — nine resulting from deaths and 12 from resignations. So how does the New Jerseyan fit into the overall pattern?

In 18 of the 20 appointments before Chiesa, the newly named Senators were of the same party as their predecessors. So replacing an archliberal Democrat with a self-described conservative Republican, as is happening in New Jersey, is a real break in usual practice.

However, this is not particularly hard to explain. In only 3 of the 20 cases of vacancies were the Governor and the outgoing Senator of different parties, as with Chris Christie and Frank Lautenberg.

Chiesa fits more comfortably into another emerging pattern: he is a “placeholder” Senator who indicates that he will not run for the seat and who is not really a political figure in his own right. (Although Chiesa was the sitting state Attorney General, New Jersey is one of seven states that fills the AG job by means other than popular election.) Of the 20 other Senators appointed since 1993, seven broadly fit into the placeholder category, with six of these having been appointed just since 2009. Continue reading “The History of Gubernatorial Senate Appointments” →

Lautenberg’s Passing Highlights the Strangeness of Gubernatorial Appointments to the Senate

Posted on June 5, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The latest vacancy in the U.S. Senate, created by the death of Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, is a reminder of a rather obscure centennial that took place last week: the enactment of the 17th Amendment on May 31, 1913 and the peculiar practice of a state-level executive appointing a federal legislator.

Until 1913, all U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures, which was part of the Founders’ plan for differentiating the House and the Senate. So whenever a vacancy arose in the Senate due to death or resignation, the state legislature would simply fill the position at its next session. Gubernatorial appointments to vacant seats took place from time to time, but were usually short-term affairs that lasted only until action by the state legislature.

Since enactment of the 17^th Amendment, gubernatorial appointments can last much longer – in some cases as long as two years. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, thirty-six states allow governors to fill vacancies until the next regular election; most of the other 14 allow governors to make interim appointments until a special election. Continue reading “Lautenberg’s Passing Highlights the Strangeness of Gubernatorial Appointments to the Senate” →

Already, The Most Unproductive Congress Ever

Posted on May 31, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

At the end of 2012, the 112th Congress went down in history as the most unproductive ever. During 2011-2012, Congress passed a mere 283 laws – fewer than a third of the more than 900 laws passed by the “do-nothing Congress” derided by President Harry S Truman in 1948.

The current Congress, however, is already on track to shatter the dubious record set by its predecessor.

Sixty-six days into the current session (Congress is again in recess this week), Congress has passed a whopping … 10 laws. Count them.

And the most recent of these – Public Law 113-10 – was enacted to address this pressing priority: “To specify the size of the precious-metal blanks that will be used in the production of the National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coins.”

Even to catch up to last Congress’s legislative output, Congress would need to pass roughly one bill every other day (and with no more breaks for recess).

Continue reading “Already, The Most Unproductive Congress Ever” →

A Senatorial Centennial: How Congress Was Reshaped 100 Years Ago This Week

Posted on May 31, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you think that dysfunction and elitism in the U.S. Senate are now at an all-time high, then this is a good time to recall that for the first 12 decades of American history, it was often much worse.

It was on May 31, 1913 — exactly one hundred years ago — that the 17th Amendment was enacted to shift the election of senators from state legislatures to the voters of each state. This is a largely forgotten episode of American political history, but its effects still resonate down until today.

The original design of Congress only envisioned U.S. Representatives as directly representing the people. Members of the upper house were seen to represent the states and to give them a powerful influence on national domestic politics, and also on the ratification of international treaties. After the Civil War, Populists began calling for the Senate to be more directly representative of the people.

By the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, other problems had also crept in. State legislatures with chambers under the control of different parties sometimes could not agree on a Senate choice, leaving the seat vacant. These deadlocks were all too often broken through corruption and backroom dealing by party bosses, some of the same concerns that also led progressives to champion the introduction of primary elections.

Continue reading “A Senatorial Centennial: How Congress Was Reshaped 100 Years Ago This Week” →

Mayoral Races of ’70s Offer Similarities, if Little Insight, to the Current Field

Posted on May 26, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing on the New York City mayoral race, New York Times‘ Sam Roberts quotes Fred Siegel on the race’s similarities to the 1970s race:

As it turned out, Mr. Biaggi wound up third in the field of four major candidates. Mr. Beame, then the comptroller, came in first but did not earn enough votes to avoid a runoff against Herman Badillo, a Bronx congressman hoping to become the city’s first mayor of Puerto Rican descent.

But Mr. Badillo’s ill-advised derision of Mr. Beame as “a malicious little man” during a particularly nasty debate helped seal his fate.

Mr. Beame won the runoff, 61 percent to 39 percent, and was easily elected the city’s first Jewish mayor in November, succeeding John V. Lindsay, who had chosen not to run.

“It wasn’t clear who was going to follow him, so you ended up flooding the field,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. “No one could stake a strong claim.”

Read the entire article here.

How to Save the GOP

Posted on May 23, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Atlantic’s Molly Ball quotes PPI President Will Marshall while discussing what Republicans can learn from the Democrat’s revival:

The DLC had initially pursued a “big tent” strategy aimed at winning over Democrats from across the political spectrum. But as Kenneth S. Baer recounts in his book on the council, Reinventing Democrats, the group found itself not standing for anything in particular. The DLC eventually embraced a more confrontational strategy, denouncing the party’s ways at meetings across the country. The process was ugly, the sort of spectacle parties generally go to great lengths to avoid. But these New Democrats, as they called themselves, were serious about change. “Our goal was not to unify the party but to expand it,” Al From, the founder of the DLC (which closed down in 2011), told me recently.

Along the way, the DLC tried and discarded other strategies. One was working within the Democratic National Committee. “National committees are consumed by fund-raising, campaigns, and electoral mechanics—they don’t really do doctrine,” Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank founded by the DLC in 1989, said. “We needed an external perch from which to critique and change an organization in decline.”

Read the rest of the article at The Atlantic.

Don’t blame Apple; blame the tax code

Posted on May 23, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Capitol Hill hearing on the IRS scandal this week upstaged another Senate investigation into how U.S. technology companies shelter earnings from domestic taxes. That was just as well, since the real culprit here isn’t tax-dodging corporations; it’s America’s absurd corporate tax code.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had hoped to make a media splash by landing a big fish rarely seen in Washington: Apple CEO Tim Cook. It released a 40-page report on the eve of the hearing, excoriating Apple’s use of “gimmicks” to avoid paying U.S. taxes on $44 billion in offshore income between 2009 and 2012.

Chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, the subcommittee has been investigating the tax avoidance strategies of major U.S. tech firms. Last year, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were in the dock; Tuesday, it was Apple’s turn.

Continue reading at CNN.com.

Regulatory Improvement Commission: A Politically-Viable Approach to U.S. Regulatory Reform

Posted on May 9, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The natural accumulation of federal regulations over time imposes an unintended but significant cost to businesses and to economic growth. However, no effective process currently exists for retrospectively improving or removing regulations. This paper first puts forward three explanations for how regulatory accumulation itself imposes an economic burden, and how this burden has historically been addressed with little result. We then propose the creation of an independent Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC) to reduce regulatory accumulation. We conclude by explaining why the RIC is the most effective and politically-viable approach.

A well-functioning regulatory system is an essential part of a high-growth economy. Regulations drive business decisions, such as where to locate production and where to invest in the local workforce. They provide guidelines that keep the air clean, protect consumers, and ensure worker safety. Smart regulations enable the capital markets to function properly, financing the trades, contracts, and insurance that allows businesses to survive and grow.

A successful high-growth strategy requires a regulatory system that balances innovation and growth with consumer well-being. A regulatory structure that is too prescriptive could restrict investment in job-creating innovation if companies are overwhelmed by costly rules, hampering potential economic growth. On the other hand, a regulatory structure that is too relaxed may threaten the environment or unnecessarily place consumers at risk.

A regulatory system that achieves this balance must include a mechanism for addressing regulatory accumulation—what we define as the natural buildup of regulations over time.

Regulatory accumulation is both a process and an outcome of our reactive regulatory structure. Over time regulations naturally accumulate and layer on top of existing rules, resulting in a maze of duplicative and outdated rules companies must comply with.

However, our current regulatory system has no effective process for addressing regulatory accumulation. Every president since Jimmy Carter has mandated self-evaluation by regulatory agencies, but for various reasons this approach has been met with limited success.

In this paper we propose the creation of an independent Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC), to be authorized by Congress on an ongoing basis. The RIC will review regulations as submitted by the public and present a recommendation to Congress for an up or down vote. It will have a simple, streamlined process and be completely transparent. Most importantly, it will review regulations en masse in a way that is politically viable.

Download “205.2013-Mandel-Carew_Regulatory-Improvement-Commission_A-Politically-Viable-Approach-to-US-Regulatory-Reform”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

“Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity

Posted on April 19, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s new budget attempts to define a progressive alternative to conservative demands for a politics of austerity. Having just returned from a gathering of center-left parties in Copenhagen, I can report that European progressives are wrestling with the same challenge, and are reaching similar conclusions.

There was wide agreement that the wrong answer is to revert to “borrow and spend” policies that have mired transatlantic economies in debt, while failing to stimulate sustained economic growth. The right answer is a “cut and invest” approach that shifts spending from programs that support consumption now to investments that will make our workers and companies more productive and competitive down the road.

“You can only have a Nordic model if you’re competitive,” declared conference host Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark. “In this country, we cannot tax more; it’s that simple,” she added. “If you like the welfare state, if you want to sustain it, you have to take the tough decisions.” Continue reading ““Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity” →

Obama Took His Time In Calling Boston Marathon Attack ‘Terrorism’

Posted on April 17, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

McClatchy’s Anita Kumar quotes PPI President Will Marshall on the President Obama’s response to the Boston marathon attack:

In his first term, the president was criticized for his responses to several potential incidents of terrorism.

Most notably, he was vacationing in Hawaii in 2009 and waited three days to speak publicly about the attempted bombing of a trans-Atlantic Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land in Detroit.

“There’s a suspicion among Republicans that he is only willing to be tough against al Qaida and nobody else,” said Will Marshall, a former Democratic speechwriter who heads the Progressive Policy Institute research center.

Obama, Marshall said, struck the right tone in trying to calm the nation after three people were killed and more than 170 were wounded Monday in two blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

“When there is a crisis we look to the president to be calm, not to be excitable, not boiling over,” he said.

Read the entire article here.

The Bill Clinton and DLC Model For Reinventing the Republican Party

Posted on March 14, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of annual camp meeting for the American right, opens in Washington today amid controversy over who’s in the tent and who’s not. Not invited were two prominent GOP governors, Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, yet the obnoxious Donald Trump managed to snag a ticket.

This was too much for conservative realists, who think the movement can ill afford to shun Republicans who know how to win elections and govern in blue and purple states like New Jersey and Virginia. “When a party is in the minority, it has to add, not subtract,” huffed Jennifer Rubin. “CPAC’s cardinal sin was in foolishly trying to toss out others instead of building the broadest coalition.”

She’s right. Republicans have failed to win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Their message may sound like the revealed truth to the CPAC faithful, but it repels moderate voters. And they blame their losing streak on bad candidates, inept organizing, insufficient funds, beastly attack ads—everything but what they stand for.

I have seen this movie before, only then, in 1989, it starred the Democrats. As one of the original New Democrats who worked with Bill Clinton to turn the party around, I see some striking parallels between then and now.

Democrats had just come off their third straight presidential loss, this time to a candidate, George H.W. Bush, who seemed like pretty weak tea after the intoxicating Ronald Reagan. Their nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, was no left-wing firebrand, but a smart and utterly decent technocrat. Even so, he could not overcome the electorate’s lingering mistrust of ’70s-style economic and cultural liberalism.

In 2012 Republicans likewise nominated a Massachusetts governor who stressed competence over ideology. They also were confident of victory (despite the consistent findings of voter surveys, which apparently get about as much respect from conservatives as climate science) and so were rudely surprised when Obama beat Mitt Romney handily.

Paul Ryan’s Third Strike

Posted on March 13, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If Rep. Paul Ryan was chastened by his 2012 election defeat, it doesn’t show in his latest budget. It’s a defiant reaffirmation of libertarian dogma that makes no pretense of being a realistic blueprint for governing.

In fact, the House Budget Committee chairman’s new plan aims to shrink government on an even faster timetable than his previous two, balancing the federal budget in 10 years. He proposes to cut public spending by $4.6 trillion over the next decade, but raises nary a penny in new tax revenue.

That of course makes his plan radioactive to Senate Democrats and President Obama, who campaigned and won on explicit promises to take a “balanced” approach to debt reduction. Nonetheless, Ryan seems quite pleased with his handiwork. “We House Republicans have done our part,” he wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. “We’re outlining how to solve the greatest problems facing America today.”

Actually, all Ryan’s plan proves is that it is mathematically possible to balance the budget in 10 years with spending cuts alone. So what? You could achieve the same result by raising taxes the same amount. Neither is going to happen. Democrats will never accede to the first, and Republicans will never accede to the second.

Stop the Debt!

Posted on January 29, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing for Politico, Will Marshall argues that President Obama should counter the Republican’s proposal of balancing the federal budget in 10 years with an achievable goal of stopping the debt growth this year:

Republicans have retreated twice this month on the fiscal front, but they aren’t giving up. After having been forced to swallow higher tax rates and a debt ceiling increase, they’ve regrouped behind a new demand: balance the federal budget in 10 years.

That’s not going to happen, but no matter: The GOP is making an ideological statement. President Barack Obama should counter with a realistic fiscal goal, one Congress could actually achieve this year: Stop the debt from growing.

It’s finally dawned on Republicans that control of the House doesn’t entitle them to dictate the nation’s agenda. Still, they want to keep debt reduction front and center in Washington, because it’s a proxy for what conservatives regard as the nation’s overriding priority: shrinking the federal government.

But Obama won the election, and he has other ideas. One of them is not letting the right hold America’s economy hostage to demands for brutally deep cuts in public spending. The public backs the president, as evidenced by polls showing Americans believe GOP rigidity is the chief obstacle to a fiscal compromise.

Read the piece at Politico.

Ending the Endless Election Season

Posted on January 28, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

National elections in the United States now stretch out over nearly 24 months, with each new electoral cycle seeming to start up almost as soon as the last has ended. By contrast, British law allows elections in the United Kingdom to last no more than 17 working days. In 2005, for instance, the electoral season began on April 11 with the formal dissolution of Parliament and the vote was taken on May 5. The U.K. is not alone in the speed of its elections: the 2008 Canadian federal election began on September 14 and ended on October 7. That same year, elections in Italy lasted a slightly longer seven weeks, while in 2010 in the Netherlands the process took ten weeks.

There are reasons that the United States probably can’t have elections quite as compact as those in parliamentary democracies. But do they really need to last 40 times as long as in Britain, or even 10 times as long as in the Netherlands? And do our elections need to be so exorbitantly expensive? The $49 million cost of the 2010 U.K. parliamentary election was 120 times less than the almost $6 billion cost of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, or about 1/23rd as much per capita.

There is much that the U.S. system can learn from other democracies that would enable it to significantly streamline, simplify, and shorten our interminable electoral process for both the president and Congress, as well as state and local offices. Following are five ideas from around the world. Not all could be easily or directly imported into the U.S. system, but at a minimum they offer food for thought; in some cases they offer the start of blueprints for action.

Download the policy brief.