Coming To An America Near You

I've long argued (along with the excellent Digby and the fantastic crew at Calitics.com) that the real lesson of California's budget disaster is the fact that while Republicans complain for months about remaking one-sixth of our economy if that one-sixth of our economy is health care, they have no problem whatsoever rolling the dice on one-sixth of our economy if that slice is the state of California.

More and more folks are coming around to the notion of  "As goes California, so goes the nation" and what it really entails:  As goes California's ungovernable budget disaster with all solutions blocked by an angry minority, so goes the United States Senate.  Today, Ezra Klein joins their ranks with a must-read article.
(More after the jump...)

California's fiscal crisis will look sadly familiar to close watchers of the national checkbook. That's because California is not having a fiscal crisis so much as a political crisis. The trigger may have been the recession, but the root cause was written into the state constitution, and it was visible long before the housing boom went bust.

In California, passing a budget or raising taxes requires a two-thirds majority in both the state's Assembly and its Senate. That need not pose a problem, at least in theory. The state has labored under that restriction for a long time, and handled it with fair grace. But as the historian Louis Warren argues, the vicious political polarization that's emerged in modern times has made compromise more difficult.

All of this, however, has been visible for a long time. Polarization isn't a new story, nor were California's budget problems and constitutional handicap. Yet the state let its political dysfunctions go unaddressed. Most assumed that the legislature's bickering would be cast aside in the face of an emergency. But the intransigence of California's legislators has not softened despite the spiraling unemployment, massive deficits and absence of buoyant growth on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.

That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

If all this is sounding familiar, that's because it is. Congress doesn't need a two-thirds majority to get anything done. It needs a three-fifths majority, but that's not usually available, either. Ever since Newt Gingrich partnered with Bob Dole to retake the Congress atop a successful strategy of relentless and effective obstructionism, Congress has been virtually incapable of doing anything difficult because the minority party will either block it or run against it, or both. And make no mistake: Congress will need to do hard things, and soon. In the short term, unemployment is likely to remain high and the economy is likely to remain weak unless Congress can muster another round of serious stimulus spending. The economist Karl Case, co-founder of the famed Case-Shiller housing index, now believes that earlier optimism about our economic recovery -- which he shared -- was misplaced. "The probability is very high of a serious double dip like 1982," he told the New York Times. The housing market seems to be sagging again, and the government's interventions -- not just the stimulus but also relaxed standards at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Authority -- are set to end.

And the practical upshot of all this is that it's not taxes that are the issue, but the notion that the Republican minority believes it has no political reason to work with the Democrats.  We saw this all through the summer.  Democrats would offer a compromise on the Senate Finance health care bill, and the Republicans would simply reject it out of hand, because they believed they would benefit more politically by refusing to find a solution.

In California, that has turned into "We as the minority party refuse to let you solve the problem.  You must therefore do what we say, because we effectively control the situation now."  What's going on isn't a check of majority power...it is an ineffective check on minority power.

By refusing to even participate in government and effectively shutting it down, where the majority no longer matters, only the larger super-majority, then nothing gets done.  The people paying the price are those who can least afford it.  But that's fine if you're a Republican...you're probably a Democratic voter anyway, so screw you.

And in the end, that's the point.  Screw you.