Musings re Citizen Lawmakers

Back in 2010, it was the Tea Partiers—lots of previously unaffiliated folks coming out of the woodwork and asking, as this Times article suggests, "Why not me?"

The new class of lawmakers will contain the highest number of members with no experience of elective office in decades, likely since 1948, when there were 44 such House members elected....

The NRCC gushed, "Their lack of political experience was and is their best asset." The Times mused that "It remains to be seen how much impact the new class of inexperienced politicians will have on legislative matters." And Norm Ornstein suggested, "A lot of the members coming in believe what they've seen on television, that all you have to do is do the right thing and it will happen."

I'd posit that we may now be paying the price for that cluelessness. The Congress we have now is as dysfunctional a bunch as I remember seeing, and surely part of that comes from a complete lack of knowledge about how to legislate. Allen West may have been correct about the original intention of the Founders to have citizen lawmakers who serve and return home, but the Founders never pictured representatives who relied so much on their staffs. Congress starts to look like certain embassies, where the Big Name is simply for show and the little people behind the scenes do all the work.

Now we're facing a similar "Why not me?" from the other side of the aisle, as dozens of would-be representatives leap into the fray. In the 19th, there are six Dems eager to take on Faso: a deacon, a lawyer, a small business owner, a former Cuomo press aide, a teacher, and a cyber security entrepreneur with a degree from West Point. In the 23rd, we have a retired cardiologist, a retired Air Force colonel, a teacher, a small business owner, a cyber security entrepreneur, a lawyer, a minister, and a guy who worked for the Congressional Budget Office. If they sound interchangeable, well, there you go. Theoretically, citizen lawmakers come in all types, but apparently there is some crossover.

I won't broadly state that you shouldn't run for Congress without some legislative or executive experience. Elizabeth Warren did it, and she's done just fine. It may have helped that she'd spent two years chairing a Congressional Oversight Panel and knew a bit about Washington ways, or that she's a Big Brain and a quick study, but it is certainly true that she walked into the Senate without ever having served in a village, town, county, or state government.

However, she may be the exception that proves the rule. When I look at candidates, I want to know their opinions about problems and issues, sure. But I also want some sense of how they might perform at their job. That's not just about public speaking, although that's a piece of it. It's about understanding where the divides are among federal, state, and local law and how the three fit together. It's about constituent support and reading skills and ability to draft legislation without leaving the brunt of it to some staffer.

It's great that a handful of the candidates in 19 and 23 have done some committee or planning board work. It's nice that a few have lobbied for pet issues or are married to policy analysts. And it's absolutely true that we haven't done that well even when we've had longtime legislators in charge.

I liked Matt McHugh, who was never a legislator, although he served as Tompkins County District Attorney and as a State Democratic Committee member before running for Congress. I also liked Maurice Hinchey, who was a member of the State Assembly for many years before his time in Congress. I respected Amo Houghton, who walked into Congress from the business world. And I can't stand Claudia Tenney, who was an assemblywoman before winning the Congressional seat from the 22nd.

So maybe there's no reason for me to get my back up over the number of people running for Congress without having paid their dues and learned the ropes. Maybe it's fine to have citizen lawmakers fresh off the boat from whatever profession they currently occupy. After all, I'm for term limits; I don't want people overstaying their welcome in government.

But I'd feel so much more comfortable if I had a little more to go on than just "What I believe is what you believe." Bad enough that it's amateur hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Hypocrisy, Venality, Cynicism

I have nothing much to say about the Tax Act, except that the flipflopping of the one-time no voters is at least as egregious as the amaurotic ignorance of the constant yes voters, one of whom represents me in Congress. This op-ed is a pretty good summary.

How could nearly every Republican representative — and all 52 Republican senators — support the tax bill? The best answer may be the most cynical: because it benefits key leaders, their friends, their heirs and their donors.

Our governor is on record as threatening the four NYS members of Congress who voted for the bill. He is also making news for his plan to have the state divest from the fossil fuel industry. These are fine ways to appeal to progressives, although he could have called for divestment, I suppose, in any year that wasn't leading up to his re-election. However, these moves are overshadowed in my mind by the fact that last Monday he vetoed a bill that would have made a technical adjustment in the tax cap by clarifying that a school district's costs related to BOCES capital should be treated in the same way as the district's capital costs, which are currently excluded from the tax cap calculation. This is something that has twice passed the Assembly and Senate, because it is a no-brainer, but because it might be misconstrued as loosening the tax cap, Cuomo cannot bring himself to support it.

The result is very simple. No group of districts can afford to pay the millions required to update and upgrade BOCES facilities without state assistance. Any BOCES facility (including ours) that needs to expand or make major improvements can forget about it. Students who attend regular public schools are assured of regular fixes, but their sisters and brothers with disabilities, special needs, or a desire to learn a trade will have to make do with failing buildings, be crammed into overcrowded spaces, or end up shipped to faraway BOCES that can accommodate them. But hey, they don't vote.  #kidslivesmatter

Roll, Tide

The best part of Doug Jones's squeaked-out win is watching Alabama women on Pantsuit Nation post about their pride at being a part of it—and then reading all the Thank yous from all over America. Black women made this happen, assisted by young people.

No Statute of Limitations

Look, it took me a while, too. But you can't say the GOP is acting egregiously by trading a vote in the Senate for their souls and then turn around and say "But we need Al Franken's vote and voice!" You don't get to put bad actors on a sliding scale of moral dysfunction unless you've been personally victimized by each of them in turn. You can't say that our side is eating its own while the other side is getting off scot free; you have to say that our side is doing the right thing, and their side is doing the wrong, evil thing. You can't suggest that a person's youthful shenanigans aren't relevant if that youthfulness is defined as that person's 30s or 40s. There's no statute of limitations on being an asshole.

And of COURSE we should be going after Donald Trump. And Justice Thomas. And Woody Allen. And Roman Polanski. And Ted Kennedy should be glad he's dead.

The GOP Plan, Personalized

NPR has been especially good at providing charts and information about the contents of the enormous GOP tax plan. Although we don’t yet know what a reconciled bill might look like, I’ve used some of their information on the House and Senate proposals to guesstimate the effect on our household.

TAX BRACKET
There’s not a lot of change for us here. Under the House bill, we may stay the same. Under the Senate bill, we might go down a percentage point. If we made $50K more a year, we’d see a much bigger drop. (Note to self: Make more money.)

STANDARD DEDUCTION
We don’t take the standard deduction, so this is moot. I am self-employed and typically pay quarterly taxes and itemize. If we did take the standard deduction, our deduction would actually go down, from $25,450 for a family of three (with existing personal exemptions) to $24,000 (with such exemptions removed)—not the fabulous bargain the GOP has implied. Nevertheless, it may end up being a better deal than itemizing, now that so many other deductions are going away. We will have to see.

CHILD TAX CREDIT
From around $1000 now, this could go up to as much as $1600 to $2000 or so. We're no longer eligible, since our dependent is over 17. We might now get a temporary credit of $300 to $500 for a dependent who's not a child. And luckily for us, we don’t use child care anymore, because that deduction is gone.

SALT (State and Local Taxes)
This was a battle between Senate and House. Right now, with the Collins amendment, it looks like we’ll only be able to deduct up to $10K for state and local property taxes. That’s a sizable loss for us; our school taxes alone are over $12.5K. Deducting state and local taxes is a key reason for people in NYS and other high-tax states to itemize. Losing or lowering this is going to hurt. We'll get hurt, and so will local accountants!

TUITION WAIVERS
Our dependent is about to graduate from college and intends to join a national program that will help her earn graduate school tuition through work. It now looks likely that any GOP tax plan will attempt to tax the money she does not pay toward tuition as though it were earned income. Nor would she any longer be able to deduct $5,250 in employer-provided work-related education, should it be offered to her. Instead of seeing her launch her career debt-free and independent of us, it seems very likely that we will end up subsidizing her continuing education or helping her to find loans—whose interest, by the way, she will no longer be able to deduct.

EARNED BENEFITS
Marco Rubio let slip what most of us knew would happen once the tax bill became law—the GOP plans to go after Social Security and Medicare to make up some of the trillion-dollar burden on the deficit. Depending what that looks like, we have a relative who may need our assistance sooner rather than later. Not to mention that we ourselves are going to qualify for those benefits within the decade, if they still exist.

STATE EFFECTS
NYS will be hard-pressed to balance a state budget if upper income taxpayers can’t offset their property taxes with SALT and start leaving in droves. So what will the state do—cut services? One of us works for the state and could lose his budget or his job if that happens. Raise taxes to cover the losses? That will hurt, too. Your tax bill, and ours, is more than just one bill. Cut it in one place, and it may balloon somewhere else.

IN CONCLUSION
If the GOP plan is reconciled, our 2019 federal tax bill is likely to be higher than our 2017 tax bill. We will lose a lot in SALT. We might gain a little if we change tax brackets. And by 2025, only our millionaire friends (note to self: Make some millionaire friends) will be paying less than they do today; we will certainly be paying more than we would have if the tax structure stayed as it currently is. Even the breaks for small businesses in the GOP plan are designed to help the top 1 percent, not a small business like mine.

Let's consider, too, what those taxes will pay for. For example, this year's budget eliminates teacher training and cuts food in schools, coastal research programs, NIH training, affordable housing programs, senior-work programs, education at NASA, and 50 programs with the EPA. It increases the size of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps while slicing back UN peacekeeping funds.

Add to that some of the hidden features of the GOP tax plan—allowing churches to endorse candidates without losing tax-exempt status! letting parents start 529 funds for the unborn or apply them to private K-12 education!—and you have a tax plan that is designed to support a right-wing agenda while ensuring that the rich get richer. I’m not surprised that the GOP didn’t reveal the Senate plan until half an hour before the vote. I’m a little surprised that they had the stones to let it be seen at all.

UPDATE: NPR reports that the 529 for fetuses may be out of the revised bill.
UPDATE 12/14: And now it looks like they're losing the awful tuition waiver plan.

Lone Hawk

So it turns out Bob Corker was the only real deficit hawk in Congress. The other Republican senators were, as this September GQ story predicted, using hawking as "a cover story to disguise callous opposition to social programs."

It may seem bizarre to see this cavalier attitude toward budgets in the very people who stymied Obama at every turn, allegedly to balance the budget or lower the deficit. But if you accept that all of that was about stopping Obama, that none of it was about deficits or the national debt, it starts to make some kind of sense. Not that the deficit isn't still in play; next up will be a determined effort to cut social programs to keep that deficit from ballooning into the trillions. Expect no mention to be made of the tax bill that caused that problem in the first place. Because in this brave new world, not only does no one blame you for lying about your intentions, but also no one remembers your lies 20 minutes after they are uttered.