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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > January > 28
Friday, January 28, 2011
Editorial: Emanuel case like Husted’s
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted must have watched the Rahm Emanuel residency flap of the past week with special interest. The parallels between their cases are remarkable.
Former U.S. Rep. Emanuel is running for mayor of Chicago, having lived in Washington when he was chief of staff for President Barack Obama. Former state Rep. Husted ran for the state Senate in 2008, having lived in Columbus as speaker of the House.
Some authorities say Mr. Emanuel is a legitimate resident of Chicago under the law and qualifies as a candidate. Some say he isn’t. Some authorities said Mr. Husted was a legitimate resident of Kettering under the law and could represent it in the Senate. Some said he wasn’t.
In both cases, different decisions were made at different levels.
Both Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Husted insisted that the issue ought not be where one sleeps, but where one intends to return. Each said his plan was always to go back home, but that government business kept him elsewhere.
There are differences, too. The legal issue in the Emanuel case was whether he could run for mayor. The Husted issue was mainly whether he could vote in Kettering. State law does say that to serve in the legislature, one must live in his or her district, but it leaves enforcement up to the legislative body. Mr. Husted’s party was solidly in control of the Senate.
Mr. Husted’s case was finally resolved in the context of his run for secretary of state in 2010. The all-Republican state Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the Republican candidate’s favor.
The most important similarity is this: In both cases, the problem is the law itself. It is too murky. In Ohio, that murkiness allowed partisans to come to the conclusions one might expect. Of the 12 judges and election officials who made a decision at one level or another, all voted according to party label: Republicans for Mr. Husted, Democrats against him.
That’s not the situation in Chicago, where just about everybody is a Democrat, but there are factions.
After getting favorable decisions at two lower levels, Mr. Emanuel lost 2-1 in an appellate court before the state supreme court stepped in on his side.
Some nonpartisan legal experts say there’s a real dispute about what Illinois law requires. One question is whether the same laws that govern whether a person can vote also govern whether a person can run for office.
If Illinois law can be interpreted to hold that a congressman from Chicago cannot take a job with a president for a couple of years without giving up his legal right to run for mayor, then the law is preposterous.
In Ohio, various laws say the crucial issue is where the candidate’s family lives, where the person plans to return, or, in the case of somebody with a state job, where the person lived before taking the job. Those conflicting standards are a problem waiting to recur.
A good general rule is that where the law is murky, the courts should — after paying due deference to what’s actually on the books — err on the side of allowing a candidate to run or a voter to vote. The idea should be to maximize participation generally and to maximize voter choices.
The Chicago case is a reminder of how important it is to draw up residency laws carefully and consistently, so as to avoid chaos and confusion.
In Ohio, the issue of where a candidate can vote is important politically, because no candidate wants to be excluded from his own district, even if his colleagues are willing to say he can legitimately serve in the legislature.
No change in the law should make it easier for candidates to establish residency than other voters. What’s needed are clearer rules for voters in general.
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Editorial: Common ground limited mainly to seating chart
A look at the responses of local legislators to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech shows two trends at some tension with each other:
• They are eager to keep drawing a clear line between their views and the president’s and to push for more spending cuts.
• They recognize, as he does, that the public wants both parties to try to work together.
That recognition showed up in the area lawmakers’ decision to sit with members of the other party at the speech. It was a good decision, changing the tenor of the whole event. When some legislators applauded and others didn’t in response to various remarks, that looked like normal democracy on display, rather than a silly contest about who could make the most noise.
But that little symbol will not suffice, and the legislators know it.
As to the responses, newly elected Republican Sen. Rob Portman took both a hard and a soft line in his written response to the speech. He started with the hard.
“Ohioans, and all Americans, were hoping to hear concrete plans and ideas on how we can get our economy going again, get people back to work, and deal with our record deficits. We didn’t hear that tonight.”
This is in part a reference to his own legislation. Sen. Portman wants to cut employer payroll taxes by 2 percentage points for a year, just as the tax cut passed by the lame-duck Congress cut the rate for employees. The idea is to stimulate hiring.
The Portman proposal had more appeal before the lame-duck tax cut. Now the deficit is projected to be a grotesque $1.5 trillion for this year. At some point, the politicians have to stop having it both ways: raising an alarm about debt while cutting taxes.
Sen. Portman went on: “We did hear some encouraging words, and I will commit to working with the administration and members of Congress to put these words into action.”
The remaining parts of his short statement are much in that vein: grant a little, bash a little, and try to suggest that if nothing bipartisan happens, it’s the other side’s fault.
House Speaker John Boehner reversed the order: He started with soft words about bipartisanship (“We were honored … I appreciate the fact the president recognizes the need to reach out.”) and then drawing the lines.
He said the president called for more “stimulus” spending. (The quote marks are the speaker’s.) He said the president made no “commitment to the cuts and reforms the American people are demanding.” The bulk of his statement was critical.
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, also started soft, managing to get in a reference to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as a leader in making the country more competitive, a special focus of the president’s speech. Rep. Turner also praised the idea of a simplified tax code.
Then he made and enlarged on the point that the Obama spending freeze “will not slow the runaway deficits, which have characterized the past two years.”
He said that cutting spending and the debt “is the true challenge of our generation.” He said the voters said that in the election.
Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, gave less lip service to bipartisanship than the others. He didn’t go as far as Speaker Boehner in charging “stimulus.” But he said, “The president talked a lot about ‘investments,’ but if this is just a plan for another stimulus spending bill,” the people won’t accept it.
So what about that 2010 election? Clearly, people voted for a brake on the Obama agenda. But did they vote for a whole other agenda? Speaker Boehner has often said that the election wasn’t an embrace of the Republicans, but a rejection of the Democrats. It is probably best understood as a rejection of one-party rule by the Democrats.
So what now? The situation Congress faces keeps changing. The new tax cuts and the new deficit projections, combined with a sense that the economy is improving, put more focus than ever on the need to cut the deficit.
Republicans could use that as an opportunity to cut the small percentage of the budget they’ve always been hostile to anyway. Or they could recognize a need to also look at defense and middle-class entitlements, as well as taxes.
If they take the latter course, they can fulfill the need they perceive to demonstrate that they haven’t reverted to business-as-usual partisanship.
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Martin Gottlieb: Bankruptcy for states? Gingrich has tough sell
If the idea of allowing states to declare bankruptcy were to be put forth, whom would you expect to do the putting?
The states that are in the worst trouble? California, Illinois? The places that can’t imagine how they are going to get out from under their current debts?
Some particular ideological faction? Maybe the liberals, the people who have favored relatively lenient bankruptcy laws for individuals?
Well, the idea is coming from Newt Gingrich. He and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush authored a piece in the Los Angeles Times this week making the case.
The case is primarily that the states have gotten themselves in over their heads with promised pensions and medical benefits. And bankruptcy would be the easiest way out, allowing policy to be rewritten. And it would certainly be preferable to federal bailouts.
The proposal has not exactly caught fire with the authors’ friends on the political right. House Republican Leader Eric Cantor has rejected it, saying there will be no bailouts whether bankruptcy is an option or not.
The Republican and Democratic co-chairs of the national governors association have joined forces to denounce the idea.
The treasurer of California has been in the forefront of the denouncers, saying the state has the tools it needs to address its monumental budget problems, and is using them.
The big point that opponents of bankruptcy cite is that once bankruptcy is an option, state bonds will lose their appeal to investors. Nobody will trust in states as much as in the past.
Gingrich and Bush are not quite the only ones who are thinking about bankruptcy. But some others have been decidedly discreet. Nobody wants to spook the markets, which actually have shown signs of being affected just by the rumblings.
Nobody has wanted to take such a concrete step as submitting a bill for consideration in Congress (which would have to change the law to allow for state bankruptcies). The fear is an actual bill would be more upsetting than vague rumblings.
In the discussion of states that might want to avail themselves of bankruptcy, Ohio’s name doesn’t come up. Its budget problems, severe as they are, don’t stand out. And, with the economy looking up, at least a little bit, and with the state already getting serious about the necessary task of reining in public pensions, that doesn’t seem likely to change soon.
But Ohio was a leader among states in seeking a federal bailout as part of the Obama stimulus. Gov. Ted Strickland was proud of his role. And that bailout certainly did help the state government get through the recession.
But now the political situation has changed dramatically. Republicans are in a just-say-no mood on further bailouts. That causes some of them to toy with the idea that Congress should offer the states something in lieu of money.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn has raised the bankruptcy option as a possibility. He hasn’t embraced it, just raised it, asking Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke about it. (Bernanke said he thought the states probably already have the tools they need.)
Gingrich’s exceptional enthusiasm surely reflects his desire to undercut public employee unions. They are a generally Democratic force and have become more powerful as private-sector unions have waned. Bankruptcy proceedings would hold out the hope of undoing quickly and dramatically gains they have made through collective bargaining over decades.
Gingrich says that even in the absence of actual bankruptcy proceedings, the very existence of a law allowing for them would rein in the unions. It would make unions think about how much worse they might fare if matters proceeded to court.
Of course, Gingrich, a possible presidential candidate, is also a guy who simply enjoys being out there with big, bold new ideas. He relishes that reputation (which endears him to columnists). His conservative comrades know that about him and take him with a grain of salt.
So here we have a proposed mechanism that the country has done without for 200 years. One might think that alone would put conservatives on guard.
Congress has an easy call to make: Before taking this seriously, let’s wait until the call for a new state option comes from the actual states, as opposed to a free-floating political opinionizer.
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