The Arizona State Senate passed a birther bill yesterday mandating the following:

A CERTIFIED COPY OF THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE’S LONG FORM BIRTH CERTIFICATE THAT INCLUDES AT LEAST THE DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH, THE NAMES OF THE CANDIDATE’S MOTHER AND FATHER, INCLUDING INFORMATION SUFFICIENT TO DETERMINE THE CITIZENSHIP OF BOTH PARENTS, THE NAMES OF THE HOSPITAL AND THE ATTENDING PHYSICIAN, IF APPLICABLE, AND SIGNATURES OF ANY WITNESSES IN ATTENDANCE.

The name of the game here, as Dave Weigel explains, is that it “has been written so that Barack Obama’s certificate of live birth, which does not include the name of the hospital and attending physician, does not count.” This reminds that though I am most certainly a natural born citizen of the United States of America, it turns out that I can’t produce a birth certificate to prove it. I wanted to use mine a few years ago to document something to get a passport, and my dad didn’t know where mine is. The best I can figure out my mother put it . . . somewhere . . . and now it’s lost. But fortunately people don’t run around making bad faith arguments about my non-American origins.

But a larger issue here is the injustice of the natural born citizen clause of the constitution. Why shouldn’t an immigrant be president? My understanding of the provision is that the Framers were worried that a foreign power might send a prince to the United States to marry the President’s daughter and then take over. Something like that. But this hardly seems like a pressing danger!

I wrote yesterday afternoon about elitist opposition to democratic accountability, but the same phenomenon also has a populist guise in the form of, among other things, term limits endorsed this week by seven of the nine people running for DC’s open at large city council seat.

Term limits for the chief executive make a certain amount of sense in a developing country trying to establish democratic institutions. But despite their popularity, they have no legitimate role in a stable advanced democracy. Voters should keep being represented by the same person until either the voters get sick of the person or the person gets sick of the job. That’s democracy. What happens when you contravene democracy by introducing term limits, is that practical power shifts into the hands of unelected staffers (to the extent that they’re available) and unelected lobbyists (who are always plentiful). Legislating isn’t child’s play, after all, you need to have some familiarity with the issues and the process. Extra power naturally flows to veterans. In a democratic legislature, may of the veterans are veteran legislators—elected officials. In a limited legislature, the only veterans are the staffers and the lobbyists. But that doesn’t change the fact that the veterans have knowledge and knowledge is power.

And at the executive level, who among us is really happy that Al Gore ran in 2000 instead of Bill Clinton? Who did that help?

(cc photo by kevindooley)

Mark Kleiman writes about a friend who’s a great admirer of East Asia’s successful autocracies and observes that disdain for democracy is “not a viewpoint often seen in print; I wonder how widespread it is?”

My sense is that in a sublimated way, anti-democratic sentiments are very common among the American elite. This is one reason why there’s such tenacious support for counter-majoritarian elements of the legislative process. If major legislative change requires agreement between the leadership of both major political parties, then elections have very little efficacy in terms of determining policy outcomes. To my way of looking at it, that’s a bad thing because it undermines democratic accountability. But if you don’t believe in democratic accountability, it’s a good thing because essentially the same relatively small group of senatorial pivot points determine the outcome at all times. Of course this also generates a massive status quo bias that the elite often dislikes in one respect or another. But instead of proposing to alleviate the status quo bias by making the institutions less bound to the status quo, the conventional wisdom is that we need more bipartisan commissions to further ensure that decision-making is divorced from electoral accountability.

I think all that’s nuts. I’m not much of a populist, and it’s not that I think the masses have all the answers (if you look at polls it’s clear that public opinion is confused about a great many things) but I really do think that democratic accountability is very important. People who win elections should govern, and if the results of their governance are bad they should lose power. That’s an incentive-compatible mode of governance. Something like “procedure nobody understands determines outcomes, and the party that doesn’t hold the White House benefits from bad results no matter who was responsible for them” is not.

Maine state representative Linda Valentino (D-Saco) is pushing the excellent idea of amending the Maine constitution to eliminate its pointless bicameral structure and join Nebraska in the sweet light of unicameralism.

At the US federal level, I don’t approve of bicameralism, but I at least understand what the point of it is. Several hundred years ago, politicians in low-population states said they wouldn’t agree to form a country unless politicians from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York agreed to give them disproportionate power. So today politicians from low-population states continue to enjoy the fruits of the stubbornness of their predecessors and they don’t want to give the power up. But ever since Baker v Carr state legislatures need to apportion their own districts along principles befitting an egalitarian democracy so bicameralism at the state level just introduces random additional veto points and takes up office space. But status quo bias is a powerful force in American politics, so 49 states stick with emulating the federal government in this regard.

Molly Ball offers the intriguing thesis that toxic partisanship is being exported from Washington, DC into previously placid state capitols:

In capital after state capital, Washington’s toxic culture is seeping in, suffocating local tradition and replacing it with the Beltway’s unique contribution to American politics—the practice of permanent, total war. The shrill partisanship, hardball politics and legislative stalemate that marked Madison’s recent turn in the national spotlight are becoming an increasingly familiar presence, exported from the national parties and the campaign tradesmen and special interests who run and finance their campaigns.

I’m not really sure that works if you try to take it super-literally, since our politicians in DC are winning elections back home in the provinces. But I do think there’s something to this idea. We do seem to be seeing some kind of nationalization of state politics, where on the conservative side groups like ALEC and Americans for Prosperity have succeeded in creating a large level of uniformity on the conservative agenda in state capitols. That’s created a fair degree of counter-uniformity as progressives push back. But this really is an asymmetrical phenomenon—the Cuomo and Brown administrations in New York and California don’t show any side of a coordinated progressive theory of state governance.

As usual, I have no real problem with partisanship or hardball. Indeed, over the long run I think it bolsters democratic accountability when strong political parties present the public with coherent, focused choices. The issue is that we oftentimes have political institutions that assume the existence of loose, non-ideological parties, and the institutions will have to adjust.

Marin Cogan and Jonathan Allen report that House freshman Republicans think Harry Reid is an evil big spending socialist blah blah blah. But they end on a funny note:

“The American people sent us into the Congress of the United States to do the peoples’ job, and we have done it,” Texas Rep. Quico Canseco said.

“We’re here to implore the Senate to do something. If they’ve got enough time to go and pass bills like the March 11 national or international plumbing day, then they can certainly look at our continuing resolution,” Canseco said.

This turns out to be a real thing. March 11 was World Plumbing Day. Stupid as that sounds, this World Plumbing Day YouTube video actually makes a lot of good points, most notably that improved plumbing technology has probably done more to improve public health outcomes than all the health care in the world:

The real scandal here, however, isn’t that the Senate took the time to pass a World Plumbing Day resolution, it’s that the Senate has become so ossified that the vote didn’t take place until March 14.

Karl Kurtz quotes Gregory Kroger on perhaps the greatest state level filibuster of all time:

In January 1923, the Democratic minority in the Rhode Island Senate began a low-intensity filibuster against all major legislation in an effort to force the Republican majority to call for a new constitutional convention. They were aided by a Democratic Lieutenant Governor presiding over the Senate, Felix Toupin, who refused to recognize any Republicans seeking to make motions, except a motion to call for a convention. This conflict reached a peak in June, 1924 when the Rhode Island Senate stayed in continuous session for 22 hours until the Republican majority simply got up and left. Three days later they returned for a 42-hour day-and-night session which began with a mass fistfight over control of the gavel and ended when Republican operatives placed a poison-soaked rag behind Toupin to gas him out of the presiding officer’s chair. No one was permanently harmed, but the Republican majority relocated to Rutland, Massachusetts for six months until Republican victories in the 1924 elections put an end to the struggle.

Part of the background here is that in these pre Baker v Carr days, the Rhode Island state legislature was horribly mis-apportioned, which gave the GOP a stranglehold on the legislature notwithstanding massive Democratic support from Catholic voters in growing cities. Eventually the Great Depression brought on such a Democratic wave that Theodore Francis Green got in as governor and perpetrated a quasi-legal “bloodless revolution” that changed the state constitution.

I’m never that upset about reports of Americans’ widespread civic ignorance. The nature of our party system means that a voter can really only express a very crude kind of thumbs up or thumbs down preference at the ballot box, so it’s not clear to me how a more nuanced understanding of the world would actually effectuate itself in terms of policy change. But this is one of the reasons why I worry about the lack of accountability in our system. The way the system works, when it does work, is basically that the voters choose to send a bunch of representatives to Washington. Those representatives, in collaboration with their staff and sundry advocates and interest groups, try to figure out what should be done about various issues. And if things go well, then at the margin this helps incumbents. If things go poorly, then at the margin this hurts incumbents. Consequently, incumbent legislators are well-motivated to try to make sure that things go well.

That’s not necessarily ideal (I won’t invoke the “best system except for all the others line about representative democracy, which I think is too lazy about the possibilities of beneficial reform”), but it seems workable and sustainable. What doesn’t seem sustainable to me is the system we’ve been evolving toward in which a legislative minority is able to block action and then reap the rewards of any policy failure that results. This feature of our institutional set-up, much more than public ignorance, threatens to wreck the “market” for sound public policy.

Like most Americans, I spend a lot of time worrying about the health of our political system. How, I wonder, can congress and state legislatures possibly grasp with the big problems in a climate when rich people and large corporations find it so difficult to have their voices heard? But Ken Vogel reassures me that help is on the way for long-suffering fatcats:

Not satisfied by the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate-sponsored election ads, conservative opponents of campaign finance regulations have opened up a series of new legal fronts in their effort to eliminate the remaining laws restricting the flow of money into politics.

They have taken to Congress, state legislatures and the lower courts to target almost every type of regulation on the books: disclosure requirements, bans on foreign and corporate contributions and – in a pair of cases the Supreme Court will consider this month – party spending limits and public financing of campaigns.

The sustained assault, combined with the Supreme Court’s rightward tilt on the issue, has some advocates for reducing the role of money in politics fretting about the possibility of an irreversible shift in the way campaigns are regulated and funded that would favor Republicans and corporate interests in the 2012 presidential race and beyond.

The 2012 election is coming up pretty soon, so I do think it’s plausible that monkeying with campaign finance rules can advantage GOP candidates in that election. But over the long term I always do caution people against overstating the partisan stakes in these kind of things. The Democratic Party is and always has been a lean, mean, election-winning machine able and willing to assemble whatever kind of ideological mish-mash is required to gain office. I think there’s every reason to think that whatever happens, Democrats will continue to win about half the time, if not somewhat more often than that. The real question isn’t whether the system will reach equilibrium, it’s what we’ll be debating in order to get to that point. Already the evidence suggests that politicians completely ignore the preferences of voters in the bottom third of the income distribution. That could shift to a system in which the middle third is ignored as well. Who knows. But whatever the details, in the future rich businessmen will have an even stronger voice in determining national policy.

I got a chance to talk to some Arizona state legislators from both parties yesterday afternoon and one thing even a very cursory chat drives home is the fairly disastrous consequences of some populist conceits about how a legislature should be organized. Specifically, the Arizona legislature combines low salary for members, short legislative sessions, term limits, and very limited staff (one secretary for every two state reps). This is all somehow supposed to keep representatives close to the people or prevent them from entrenching power, but in practice it amounts to a kind of government by lobbyist

After all, some of these issues are hard. And legislative procedure is hard. If at any given time a huge proportion of members are freshmen just learning the ropes of the institution and nobody has any time to consider the issues or staff to do research for them, who else are you going to turn to. Pondering the situation really drives home the “Lobbying As Legislative Subsidy” (PDF) model of what the industry is really about. Members need to take positions on the issues and speak about them to the press and to constituents. And without adequate staff or experience, they naturally end up outsourcing a lot of this work to other people—the dread special interests. And since “raise my salary and give me a bigger staff budget and repeal my term limits” is just about the most toxic political proposal I can imagine, there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it.

But this is something to keep in mind in the federal context when you hear about how this or that area of policy should be left up to the states. However unimpressed you may be by the wisdom of the United States Congress, it’s very difficult for me to think up complicated issues where pushing the issue down to under-resourced state legislators is likely to radically improve policymaking.