No Joke: State Government as a Laughingstock

So you think your life is tough just because Bernie Madoff handled your investments, a taped version of your sex life is hurtling around the Internet and the FBI has established a command post in your driveway. Buck up -- things could be a lot worse. Imagine if you were a high-school civics teacher and (here comes the horrifying specter) the curriculum required you to teach a unit about the glories of state government.

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Even before South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford added "hiking the Appalachian Trail" to the lexicon of implausible excuses used by adulterous husbands, state governments across the nation were fast becoming a laughingstock. In fact, the front page of Tuesday's New York Post featured a doctored photograph of the state senate with the members wearing Bozo masks. This was not tabloid excess but understated commentary about a legislative deadlock that included a clowns-only attempt to hold rival sessions of the state senate in the same room at the same time.

While the New York legislature may have put the diss in dysfunctional, it is California with a $24 billion deficit, a wrecked fiscal system and an incoherent propensity for government by referendum that makes General Motors look solvent. Then there is Illinois, a state where being elected governor means that they start reserving a cell for you in the penitentiary. You might recall that Rod Blagojevich received some undue attention from federal agents (and an indictment) after he allegedly tried to turn filling Barack Obama's Senate seat into a personal profit center.

By the way, California, New York and Illinois are three of the nation's five largest states. Throw in Sanford's South Carolina and New Jersey (where a culture of corruption vied with the spectacular marital flame-out of former Gov. Jim McGreevey) and it all adds up to the sad truth that more than a quarter of all Americans live in states demonstrably not ready for self government. And we have not even mentioned Louisiana, where back in 1991 the high-rolling incumbent Gov. Edwin Edwards was vigorously opposed by Ku Klux Klaner David Duke. The Edwards bumper sticker: "Vote for the Crook. It's Important."

Are we beginning to see a pattern here? Perhaps the genius of the federal system – dividing responsibility between Washington and the states – has been as over-hyped as Twitter. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis declared in a 1932 dissent, "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory." But with state governments these days, it seems like Boris Karloff is the guy wearing the lab coat.

Okay maybe, just maybe, I am being hyperbolic.

Alan Ehrenhalt, the editor of Governing magazine, which specializes in coverage of states and cities, argues that the image of state government rises and falls based on the health of the economy and whether there is effective political leadership in Washington. "These things are cyclical," he says. "Those people who have predicted the long-term centralization of power in Washington or the inevitable devolution of responsibility to the states are missing the point."

But it is also possible to argue that state government has become a laughingstock because no one cares what happens in state capitals until someone gets caught with his pants down. (Insert mental picture of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer wearing knee-high black socks during sex with a prostitute). Voters tend to have passionate pro-con feelings about their presidents and their mayors. But governors tend to be shadowy figures exiled to places that few other than lobbyists willingly visit such as Albany (New York), Springfield (Illinois) and Sacramento (California). The economic collapse of the newspaper industry has contributed to the reality that state government is the least scrutinized governmental entity aside from perhaps the American Battle Monuments Commission.

American democracy may have started with the states, but even by the late 18^th century they were on the downhill slope. Part of the rationale for the Constitution was that the Articles of Confederation were too weak to prevent the states from descending into chaos. By creating a strong central government, the Constitution left the states with only the seeds and stems of power. Their limited role in the federal system is underscored by the wording of the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States."

The problem is that ever since the New Deal, presidents (even liberal Democrats) have been nervous about being politically blamed for the growth of Big Government. So they concocted a Rube Goldberg solution: Washington appropriates the money and the states actually spend it. President Obama followed this passive we-only-write-the-checks model in putting together his economic stimulus package. That is why it was telling that the president in his Tuesday press conference conceded, "I don't feel satisfied with the progress that we've made. We've got to get our Recovery Act money out faster. We've got to make sure that the programs that we put in place are working the way they're supposed to."

And who perchance is at fault here? Could it be the Barnum & Bailey New York legislature? Could it be the anti-tax Californians who have painted their way into a fiscal corner? Could it be the crowd in Springfield that until recently pretended that Blagojevich was a normal governor? In fact, you can blame almost everybody but Mark Sanford. He was too principled and too upstanding to take the federal swag. Too bad the stimulus package did not include air tickets to Argentina.