EA's US Politics correspondent Lee Haddigan moves to the state campaigns in his pre-election coverage:
If you are following election coverage outside the US, you would be forgiven for assuming the only matter of importance they will decide is the composition of the next Congress. But alongside these federal elections, the 50 states are also holding ballots to determine their governments. The most important campaigns are the 37 governor's races, not least because the results of those elections will have a significant say in how representation in Congress is redistricted after 2010.
One of the most disconcerting experiences for the uninformed visitor to the US is the first trip to the cash register to purchase a product. There they learn that the jeans they saw at a bargain price of $19.98 will in fact cost them $21.19. At this point mutterings concerning highway robbery, and what the ****** **** is a sales tax and why isn’t it marked on the ticket price anyway, are ignored by a cashier who has heard it all before.
Tourists from Britain are not the only ones to be irritated by this point-of-purchase tax. I know Delawareans who will not leave the state, even for a jaunt to Maryland or New Jersey, because they will have to pay a sales tax. But as unpopular as it is, the tax illustrates a principle in American politics that is not fully appreciated by the beginner, the influence and scope of the 50 separate governments that form the United States of America. And, to grasp the Tea Party, it is important to recognise that much of their rhetoric rests upon the idea that the powers of an intrusive federal government should be returned, where they belong, to the states.
The sales tax, along with a state income tax, finances the provision of services by a state government. As a rough average, states add a 6% surcharge on most purchases to pay for those services. They also raise revenue through road tolls --- a source of much hilarity in Delaware, where users of Interstate 95 are stung for $4 for using approximately 11 miles of the Delaware Turnpike, and one reason why there is no sales tax in the state. Local districts within a state use property taxes to finance area schools.
This money pays for the 50 governments that spent almost $1.5 trillion last year. Florida, the third-largest state by population, spent $66 billion and employed 120,000 workers. States, as mini-governments modelled after the federal system, have executive, legislative, and judicial branches and their own constitutions setting out checks and balances.
The executive power in a state is vested in the office of the Governor. His/her main responsibility is deciding on a budget for the state and then persuading the state legislature, consisting of a House of Representatives and a Senate, to approve their recommendation. Because of this primary role, the position of Governor is often compared to the role of a Chief Executive Officer. In this case, however, the economic power of a state can be larger than that of multinational corporations.
Conservatives contend that, as the state government is more responsive to the will of the people than a distant Washington administration, more functions of government should reside within the state. The history of the United States, conservatives argue, is a narrative of the steady usurpation of state sovereignty by federal agencies.
The nation was originally formed to provide 13 ex-colonies, still facing the threat of retaliatory action from the British, with a common defence policy. The 13 new states were to act in concert on matters of foreign trade. Beyond that, all other powers were retained by the states, and their citizens maintained the right to bear arms to ensure a tyrannical national government did not attempt to overthrow their personal liberties.
This concept of a limited role for a federal government may appear anachronistic to many, but the current resurgence in constitutional conservatism is a reflection of the mood that this government has become too big, attempting to legislate with a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to appreciate the concerns of the individual states. Why, many Arizonans argue, should federallegislation --- passed by representatives of the other 49 states --- limit the ability to counter the problems caused by illegal immigration?
How did the Federal government become so big? Conservatives answer that the catalyst was theunconstitutional imposition of an income tax in the 16th Amendment of 1913. This tax that has allowed government to increase its powers, for instance, through the establishment of regulatory agencies. The tea party movement instinctively regards the “power to tax as the power to destroy”, with the federal government's taxes destroying the liberties of the individual.
In the Governor's contest in Colorado, some of these issues are coming to the fore. The Democrat candidate, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, is facing a surging run from a populist Tea Party challenger, but not from the Republican Dan Maes but from the Constitution Party-backed Tom Tancredo. An ex-congressman from Colorado, Tancredo has run on a platform of "cut taxes, cut spending, and stop illegal immigration"; a message popular enough that Tancredo only trails Hickenlooper 47-40 (with Maes at 9%) in a state that voted 57-40 for the Democrat Bill Ritter in 2006.
Enthusiasm for Tancredo has been helped by the disastrous campaign of the Republican candidate, who was caught lying about his previous experience with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. He was also boosted by Hickenlooper’s inadvertent slip on a radio show that, in parts of Colorado, “we have some of the same, you know, backwards thinking in the kind of rural Western areas you see in, you know, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico.” The Tancredo campaign, built upon an appeal to the populist distrust of political elites, could not have hoped for a more useful mistake from a candidate they have repeatedly hammered for establishing sanctuary policies for immigrants, against the wishes of the residents, in the city of Denver.
Tancredo is keen to emphasize that his run for governor is not a traditional third-party challenge, but “a challenge to the flukish nomination of an unqualified and unethical man in a single race at the top of the ticket", maintaining that rules in the Republican Party meant Maes could not be removed from the ballot. However, Tancredo is proposing changes in Colorado that owes more to a Constitution Party platform than they do to a traditional Republican manifesto.
Tancredo promises that he “will strive to lead a 10th Amendment (states' rights) revolution with my like-minded Governors around the country” and that, if he is elected, he will “refuse federal dollars that come with unsustainable, long-term state spending commitments or harmful federal mandates". As part of his commitment to ending the bloated budget of Colorado, Tancredo has announced support for two ballot initiatives that would put into practice the Tea Party rhetoric of slashing the spending of state governments as a first step in restoring fiscal responsibility in the nation. Amendment 60 calls for a generic cut in property taxes in the state, and Proposition 101 would cut vehicle registration fees, along with those on phones and television service.
Tancredo’s campaign is not without its own baggage, caused by some of his intemperate remarks in the past, including his contention that the civil rights organization the National Council of La Raza is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or nooses". But the Colorado gubernatorial contest has primarily become an indication of the strength a third-party Tea Party ticket, campaigning on the platform of a constitutionally-limited government, could exert nationwide in 2012.
The Constitution Party is unlikely to provide the vehicle for that third-party challenge, but expect to see any Tea Party movement include the message in the Constitution Party's platform: “History makes clear that left unchecked, it is the nature of government to usurp the liberty of its citizens and eventually become a major violator of the people's rights,” and as a consequence, “it is essential to bind government with the chains of the Constitution and carefully divide and jealously limit government powers to those assigned by the consent of the governed”.
These concerns are not new in the United States. For the last 75 years the conservative movement in America has been bound together by the persistent refrain that the federal government has broken the limits placed upon it by the Constitution. What infuriates conservatives is not the disagreement of liberals, but their contemptuous dismissal of the idea of the constitutionally-limited government idea as the raving of "wingnuts" and "kooks".
The most intriguing aspect of the current crop of gubernatorial contests is what happens after the results. In many races, such as Florida's, both the Democrat and the Republican candidates are standing on the platform of cutting state spending. Quite how popular a victor will be after he/she cuts spending remains to be seen. Tancredo may be an attractive candidate for the Tea Party in Colorado, but let’s see how much support he keeps, if he is elected, when Medicaid provision is cut in the state because he refuses federal matching funds.
The Tea Party has surprised me and many others with its ability to retain a coherent message for the last 18 months. Whether it continues to surprise us for the next two years will depend on the reforms it achieves, and the popularity of those changes, through its influence in state legislatures and Governor's offices after next Tuesday.