Point Austin: Indelicate Balances

It's a commonplace of political commentary (often nearby in these pages) that the U.S. Constitution and the American political system generally provide invaluable "checks and balances" that prevent hasty or precipitous government actions or the inevitable domination of public policy by special or minority interests. That's true enough, as far as it goes – in a remarkably diverse country of 300 million people with an enormously broad range of often wildly competing interests, it's only reasonable to believe that it takes a lot of compromising to determine priorities and to get anything done. Yet the other side of that coin, one that pundits often fail to acknowledge, is that under this system, it's often a lot easier to get the bad things done than the good ones.

Witness just the last eight years in Washington. In a frenzy of bipartisan hysteria, the U.S. twice engaged in undeclared (and unfinished) war with little official dissent, abused conventional government accounting and (rather than raise taxes) looted the Treasury to fight those wars, ceded regulation of the economic system to the bankers and speculators, and then panicked when the inevitable bubbles began bursting and the house of cards collapsed. Now that all that's done, a new administration, elected on the promise of new ways of doing business, is trying to pick up the pieces – and those same checks and balances that failed so badly to stop the disasters are suddenly in play to delay the reconstruction.

Consider, for just one example, the policy gridlock in the U.S. Senate, which now routinely requires 60 votes instead of a simple majority to override potential filibusters. For some reason, Democrats who generally could not, when in the minority, muster 41 votes to derail Repub­lican initiatives, now can only muster the 60 required to move forward on major economic legislation by handing the policy keys to a couple of "moderate" GOP senators. Setting aside for a moment the merits of the overall Obama administration's stimulus plan – speaking as a noneconomist, I can only hope they're doing enough to get us out of the ditch – why is it that U.S. economic policy should be held hostage, and diminished, by a couple of minority voters of the party that lost, overwhelmingly, the last two federal elections?

In this context, recall that the 18th century Constitution granted equal Senate representation to vast ranges of mostly empty state territories that now have smaller populations than House congressional districts, a polarization since greatly exaggerated by two centuries of urbanization – meaning that two senators from Wyoming (520,000) or North Dakota (640,000) weigh equally with the two senators from New York, Califor­nia, or Texas, effectively giving Senate veto power to small minorities (and unrepresentative interests) of voters.

That's definitely a "check," I guess. "Balance"? Not so much.

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One Man's Check ...

Here at home, this week the Capitol witnessed the state Republican senators riding roughshod over Senate traditions and procedural rules – those "checks" again, on the blink – in order to ramrod a voter ID bill that will structurally suppress minority (i.e., mostly Democratic) voting. You might have thought the economy and the budget would take precedence over partisan jockeying, but with a new census on the horizon, public officials want more ways to pre­select their voters. And though Texas "minorities" now in fact outnumber their white compatriots, they remain effectively powerless to "check" this official assault on their civil rights.

That brings me by degrees to the city's current budget predicament, which at first appears to be just another instance of the annual debate over local priorities, exacerbated unusually this year by the national economic meltdown. So we find ourselves, once again, in an often bitter public argument over what we can afford (or afford to cut), trying to decide what's more valuable or absolutely necessary. Predictably, the city's already rather minimal support for social services lands at the bottom of the list, but a great many other important public functions also come up short or go begging altogether: code enforcement, park and greenspace maintenance, long-term planning, and so on (pick your own priority; you can be certain it took a hit).

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Following the Money

Yet while the city deals as it must with the facts and funding on the ground, it's worth remembering that larger "checks and balances" helped create the current emergency. The state (those Republican legislators, again) not only limits how much money cities can raise from one year to the next – regardless of actual municipal needs, city to city – it has also put harsh indirect limits on city budgets by refusing to adequately fund public schools. Austinites have responded consistently by endorsing school district bond and tax initiatives, and that's in fact where most of the property-tax bite goes – but that has made City Council members even more reluctant to raise city tax rates, knowing that taxpayers, pinched on all sides, do not necessarily distinguish one revenue stream from another. Neither will the state seriously fund mass transit nor defend environmental priorities nor certainly pay for city infrastructure with the generosity it once liked to lavish on suburban highways – and all these needs roll downhill, to be confronted (and somehow paid for) by city planners and city taxpayers.

The council, this one and its predecessors, is not off the hook. The politicized reluctance to raise taxes beyond the rollback rate in flush times – or even the eagerness to cut the rate and rely instead on rising property values to make ends meet – now leaves the city with a historical backlog of unfilled needs that might have been better addressed when we were in high cotton.

But when you find yourselves arguing with your neighbor (or your public officials) about who and what is more important – firefighters or librarians, for painful example – don't forget that the terms of the argument have too often been predetermined down at the Capitol, or far beyond Austin city limits, by "checks" written elsewhere and "balances" weighed with somebody else's thumb on the scales.