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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2014 10:32 am 
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It's said that all politics is local. As Congresscritter Cantor gets trampled by folks just as lowly as himself, all of whom want to take his place, I can't help but recall this isn't the first time I've seen this.

I don't know how many of you might remember a Senator called Al D'Amato. He was a New York Republican who ran his particular partisan Washington games with such zeal that he forgot his brand was supposed to be 'senator pothole', the guy who gets local problems fixed. Or at least takes credit for it. He got so wrapped up in trying to bring down the President that he forgot all about those silly little people back home who needed to vote him back in; and they got so tired of it they elected Senator Schumer instead (who has not forgotten).

The point, aside from it still couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, is that it's nice to see that all of the American voters haven't completely forgotten they can vote Congresscritters out if they become useless partisan stick figures. Even if this time most of them did it by ignoring the election and letting some other partisan stick figure get nominated in his place.

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 Post Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2014 9:59 am 
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Ugh. I wish I had even that much hope. The districts in this part of Texas have been gerrymandered to within an inch of their lives. The Dems have no chance in most elections (hell, they don't bother fielding candidates in half the races). And the Republican primary races around here are...well, I just have to think back to the gal running for the county Superior court on how she was by far the most patriotic and boy did she support the troops. Legal background? Pshhh! Pretty sure she won. *sigh*

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 Post Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:06 am 
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Elected judges sound like a dumb idea to begin with.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 2:46 am 
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Kea wrote:
Elected judges sound like a dumb idea to begin with.

It is pretty sad. It doesn't fail to see the word "conservative" on their campaign signs before elections around here. No one who is so proud to proclaim their ideological bias should hold a position that is supposed to be impartial.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 8:34 am 
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Yep. And the intensely partisan elections of judges here is certainly in no way whatsoever connected the the ever-so-slightly-higher-than-average usage of the death penalty. Though, to be fair, we had elected judges in Washington State where I grew up and I don't remember the judiciary being as systematically messed up as it is here. Of course, those were non-partisan elections in a state with a fiercely anti-partisan electorate. I was deeply offended when I voted down here the first time and saw the "Vote Whole Party Ticket" boxes at the top. I'd thought it was bad when the courts gave the Primary elections back to the parties.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 3:49 am 
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Weremensh wrote:
all of the American voters haven't completely forgotten they can vote Congresscritters out if they become useless partisan stick figures.

Aaaand back to the original topic, the demise (or reduction) of pork barrel politics ironically might've made partisanship even worse. If they've stopped being able to tack random local construction projects onto completely unrelated bills, that pretty much cuts off the pothole repair funding and leaves senators to be partisan stick figures.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 5:25 am 
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What, are they unable to fund pothole repairs without having to sneak it through the system?

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2014 7:15 am 
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Generally speaking, the United States Senate is not the forum to be discussing issues like the state of the roads in Oklahoma. Federal bills are supposed to address issues of national importance. Yes, once every few years they will pass a transportation bill which, among other things, will allocate federal funding to local governments for road maintenance and the like, but otherwise, a senator who merely wants to fix potholes in his or her district, or build a stadium, or obtain money for their town's library system, will sneak it in on some other bill. Which leads to trading votes. If you vote for my immigration bill, I'll put some money in for your Underpants Museum.

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 Post Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 12:05 am 
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There's still the Omnibus bills, when all the work that was supposed to have been done over the entire session in multiple bills gets dumped in one massive bill at the last minute. Since the government will shut down if it's not passed (not usually considered desirable, even by the Republicans), and there's no chance of reading it all in the time remaining, all sorts of crap gets slipped into them as riders in the dead of night before the final vote. Sometimes it's caught and excised before the vote or in conference(especially if it's a really gross abuse); but more often than not this kind of a bill is regarded as a Christmas Tree and nobody is worried about a few million dollars here or there.

Of course there's only one or two omnibus bills a year; so this is a pretty pale shadow of the rider game of years past.

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 Post Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2014 3:40 am 
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Kea wrote:
Generally speaking, the United States Senate is not the forum to be discussing issues like the state of the roads in Oklahoma.


Fair enough, but then why isn't this dealt with in wherever the right forum is? (State government, I'm guessing?)

Weremensh wrote:
There's still the Omnibus bills...


That just doesn't seem right. Why don't they actually do the work during the season? Do they spend all year squabbling over meaningless trivialities and suddenly wake up to the fact that they've got an entire year's worth of stuff to shove through on the very last day or something?

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 Post Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2014 3:48 am 
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Well sure, state governments are meant to deal with state issues. The problem is that they only have access to state-level funding. Which means that plenty of congresspeople and senators have incentive to go badger the federal government for extra money.

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 Post Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2014 5:06 am 
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Okay, so why is state funding not covering road maintenance? Is this a case of insufficient funds, or is it a case of funds being spent on the wrong stuff?

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 Post Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2014 8:33 am 
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Well, various things.
One is that (as I understand), state governments in the US aren't allowed to keep a running deficit, they've got to balance their budgets. So unlike the federal government, they aren't allowed to borrow money year after year to make up for shortfalls in funds. This means they're more susceptible to recessions. If the economy goes down, so do tax receipts, and then so does spending. So states often look to the federal government as a cash cow in hard times.

Two, is that economic activity is distributed unevenly throughout the country. Large coastal cities are going to be generating more in taxes than inland agricultural states because that's where all the businesses and people are. So if you're an inland agricultural state, you may be perpetually short of money, regardless of anything else that's going on. Infrastructure has economies of scale. It's more cost effective to build a road that's going to be used by 2 million people than 20,000. But when you've only got 20,000 people in a town, you still have to build them a road. It wouldn't be politically acceptable to make them walk in the dirt.

Three, is the perpetual problem of people voting themselves lower taxes, but still wanting the same level of services. Voters don't like taxes. They also don't like budget cuts. They frequently fail to put 2 and 2 together.

Four, politics. Politicians can obtain the support of voters and other interest groups (see: local lobbyists) by obtaining federal funding for local projects. You get federal funds to build a bridge => creating jobs => gaining the support of the construction industry & construction workers. Supposedly, it is for this reason that factories building components for the military are extreeeeemely evenly distributed over America's various states. And also why it's extremely difficult to close down a military base, even if it is completely useless.

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 Post Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2014 10:19 am 
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So, to summarise, the individual states have been dependent on squeezing extra money out of the Federal budget for so long that they no longer have enough other sources of income to manage without that?

...makes sense. Still needs to be fixed, but the simplest fix would be to raise taxes, and I gather that that would be punished at the next election...

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 Post Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2014 5:32 pm 
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Many of them (including a lot of the heavily rural Republican states) are inherently poorer. Combine that with antitax politics and they'd probably hit Third World levels of public infrastructure if it weren't for federal funding. At which point citizens (and more to the point, employers) would start voting with their feet and the state would decline even further.

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