Political strategists of all stripes have been pulling their hair out over the last year about the seeming fragmentation of the US into five voting blocs – progressives, Democratic Party faithful, centrists, GOP faithful, and the so-called Tea Party. The reason this is so problematic for US politics is because the United States has a voting system known as First Past the Post, used exclusively in only a smattering of countries with functional governments. Comparativists call the different forms of group identification in the US and in other states where parties are purely ideological “cross-cutting cleavages” – essentially the idea is that party identification will be fluid because parties aren’t allowed to purposefully represent one ethnicity or religious group. So, a committed Roman Catholic might believe strongly in the Puritan value set of it being everyone’s responsibility to care for the weaker brother – Jesus referenced this in the Beatitudes – and thereby identify best with the Democrats. Or, that same Roman Catholic might decide that protecting the rights of the unborn is the most important thing this election cycle, and so will vote with the Republicans.

The beauty of this system is that it balances group identification to prevent our political system from becoming overly fragmented. But in 2010, my America looks very different. Disillusioned voters on both sides, upset with a lack of leadership in Washington, are flocking to their respective pundit classes to be told the way of the future. Now, with a balanced and responsible Fourth Estate, this would be workable. But talking heads on the right such as Glenn Beck (the keynote speaker at CPAC 2010) and Sarah Palin are passing themselves off as mainstream, and in efforts to both widen the tent and make more cash, have refused to exclude even the dangerously crazy from their faithful following.  It is irresponsible to pretend that attacks from “birthers” pretending that there is something to contest about the first African-American president’s birth certificate are anything less than racist. However, it is equally irresponsible to write these conspiracy theorists off as some kind of fringe movement.  Although their ideas are certainly not typically associated with the mainstream, they seem to have found the perfect blend of ambiguity and populism to bring as many people in as possible, whether out of terror at the health care bill (“ObamaCare”) or out of fear for Obama’s tax hikes (while actually, the opposite is true).

It is fair to assert that these groups will be somewhat marginalized by the realities of the 2010 election. However, it doesn’t necessarily take a huge amount of people to push mainstream candidates out of the way. New York’s 23rd District was nearly hijacked by a Conservative Party candidate after he won support from Beck and Palin. And the dearth of leadership and epidemic of opportunism in the GOP right now is so desperate, it is not unrealistic to anticipate a new Republican Party after 2010, tied to the coffin of Ronald Reagan and some amorphous agenda focused on tax cuts and smaller government – as long as we keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.

As I’m sure many readers are already aware, the Michigan state legislature sent a series of emergency continuation budgets to Governor Granholm’s desk at around 2 am the morning of October 1, narrowly avoiding a shutdown of state government and sending the state’s services into what was essentially regarded the 13th month of fiscal year 2009. Four weeks later, we are still at an impasse, and the only real changes have been strategic ones.

Governor Jennifer Granholm

The governor recently announced the necessity of a further series of cuts to education, bringing the total dollar value of cuts up to $289 per student if new revenues are not raised. Despite Majority Leader Bishop’s willingness to meet with Granholm, and the Senate Republican’s final decision to send the six budget bills passed by both chambers to her desk, his caucus remains obstinate on new sources of revenue. A proposed tax on physicians yielded a weak astroturf effort at lobbying Democratic votes from affluent districts, yet failed along partisan lines.

Granholm has vowed to exercise her line-item veto power and sign the remaining budget bills to make the necessary cuts to higher education, human services, and community health, among others – a scenario that looks more and more likely as Senate Republicans continue to kill new revenue ideas. But if she doesn’t do this by the end of the month, a deadline that has been firmly set for weeks yet now is just hours away, she would effectively be forcing state government into a partial shutdown until a compromise is reached and the 2010 budget is passed in its entirety.

Many observers are speculating that she will do this intentionally, as a means of forcing the Senate to pass new forms of revenue. This would be one hell of a political move, evoking images of the Daley family in Illinois more than Granholm in Michigan. It would be going back on her promise to sign these six bills once Sen. Bishop sent them to her desk, and it would make her directly responsible for the shutdown. Lt. Gov. Cherry may not be a supporter of this decision, since it is certainly not without risk for her entire administration, and he is the unquestionable Democratic frontrunner for the 2010 gubernatorial race. But if she is truly a supporter of the programs intended to serve as her legacy (the last eight years would seem to indicate that she is), the next few days should prove to be interesting at the very least.

Exclusive Update

Sources confirmed new breaking developments over the last few hours, exclusive to The Kosmopolitan. Wednesday, October 28, House freshmen drafted a letter to be sent to Governor Granholm, Leader Bishop, and Speaker Dillon asking that they stop playing politics and finish the budget. A response was sent late Thursday, casting an ultimatum: that freshmen have until December 1 to find agreeable new revenue sources from which to fund the deficit in the K-12 budget, for FY 2010 and into the future. This would seem to imply that lawmakers will be given until December 1 to fund other shortages as well, including the Department of Community Health and higher education. If this transitive assumption proves true, it is safe to assume that the Senate will pass another continuation budget, extending purgatory for the state another 30 days.

Over the past few months I’ve been at the forefront of Michigan’s budget battle witnessing first hand the bitter partisan politics that drive the Great Lakes state. Michigan is well known these days a the state that shut down two out of the past three years due to budget woes, but to say that partisan bickering is a purely Michigan problem would be false. It’s a horrible disease that is strangling our democracy and producing budget shutdowns in states like Michigan, California, and Pennsylvania, and producing lackluster results for citizens that deserve much better. It’s hard to find one root cause of these problems, but I want to focus on term limits and the major headache they’ve created for state legislatures across the nation as they struggle to understand their job and the powers that come with it.

A Purposefully Inaccurate, yet Telling Measurement of Partisan Alignment

At the end of the 1980s the idea that government was bad continued to ring out across our nation. The message of former President Ronald Reagan resonated with a new era of politicians. They found it disgusting that someone could make a career out of public service and civic duty and they were determined to change the way government worked. They were going to make government work for the people.

Noble? In some respect.

But as we’ve seen over the past fifteen plus years it hasn’t cut down on corruption. Instead states like Michigan, a state that passed term limits in 1992, simply created a revolving door of legislators. It didn’t end career cronyism; it merely created a set career path for the power hungry. Today, instead of getting to know the inner workings of the House or Senate chamber, our politicians merely act in a way that will get them elected to a higher office when their term expires or that will get them a cushy job as a lobbyist following their stint in the state capitol. Instead of weighing their conscious before a vote, they weigh their political capital. Gone is the day of bipartisanship, now reigning is a capitol catfight to the top. Any legislator that does get a hang of the system is either swallowed up in partisan games or merely swept out of Lansing thanks to the cap our state has placed on institutional knowledge.

I’ve read in many editorials that Michigan should cut legislative salaries and push a new budget deadline. These solutions won’t save very much money and the bottom line is that they won’t work because they will not create the environment that is needed to pass a budget. While term limits may mix up the legislature every two years, what they also do is block politicians from any opportunity to learn on the job or build any sort of coalition with other representatives beyond party label.

That’s the problem.

At a time when our state faces great crises our politicians must learn to work together. Unless politicians from both sides of the isle learn to cooperate with each other we will continue to see the partisan battles that have taken place over the past decade. If our politicians were smart, they would work together. If voters were smart, they would repeal legislative term limits.

Alexander Morgan blogs regularly at abmichigan.blogspot.com.