 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | December 2005 
A Wave of US Activism in States May Signal a Surge Nationwide
 Ronald Brownstein - LATimes.com
| | A marcher wearing a costume walks through the streets as thousands take part in a worldwide day of protest against global warming December 3, 2005. (Reuters/Christinne Muschi) |
It's not a news bulletin that this has been a decade of conservative dominance in Washington. Since 2001, the top domestic priority for President Bush and the Republican Congress has been cutting taxes. With a few exceptions (led by the Medicare prescription drug benefit approved during Bush's first term), the GOP majority has focused on limiting, not expanding, the federal government's size and scope.
But a counter-cyclical trend toward government activism is thriving in the states governed by Democrats and moderate Republicans. This isn't a new pattern. In earlier periods when conservatives controlled Washington, such as the 1890s, 1920s and 1980s, state-level activism flourished, notes Richard P. Nathan, director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York. And these state initiatives, Nathan argues, usually provided the foundation for the next surge in federal activism.
"When conservative coalitions controlled national offices, programs that were incubated, tested and debugged in liberal states became the basis for later national action," Nathan, a former aide to President Nixon, writes in a paper to be released this month.
Nathan has a strong case. State-level innovations such as child labor laws and public health reforms during the late 19th century helped inspire the Progressive Era outpouring of federal initiatives under presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal built on state experiments in the 1920s that established minimum labor standards and public relief for the destitute.
The Great Society stands as the great exception in this pattern, because it emerged nearly full-blown from President Johnson, like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus. But President Clinton's New Democrat agenda built on local innovations in welfare reform, community policing and healthcare for the working poor.
Today, conservative ideas focused on limiting government and cutting taxes are as powerful in most Republican-leaning states as they are in Washington. But in Democratic-leaning and swing states, experiments are developing that may headline the domestic agenda for the next president (either a Democrat or centrist Republican) committed to a more activist federal government.
Ideas sprouting in these states include a higher minimum wage (17 states exceed the national standard of $5.15 an hour), support for stem cell research that Bush has limited at the national level, universal preschool and guaranteeing all children access to healthcare.
Two of the most intriguing, and widespread, priorities in the activist states are the promotion of energy independence and the combating of global warming. Here the contrast with Washington is especially stark.
Apart from some subsidies for the development of cleaner energy, the energy legislation Bush and the GOP Congress fashioned last summer excluded every systematic effort to reduce the emission of gases associated with global warming. Caps on carbon emissions, increases in automotive fuel economy, requirements for utilities to generate more electricity from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind: all were rejected.
But in the states, those ideas are advancing — under both Republican and Democratic governors. "There is ever more interest and states are imitating and learning from each other," says Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions at the nonpartisan Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
Twenty-one states have approved measures requiring utilities to generate more of their electricity from renewable energy sources, which would reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels. In a parallel initiative, the Western Governors' Assn. is completing a plan to increase the production of renewable energy more than tenfold across the 18 Western states by 2015; by then, it hopes renewable sources will provide as much as one-fifth of the region's power.
Ten states are poised to follow California in mandating that cars and trucks reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by 30% by 2016 — if the California standard survives a court challenge from the auto industry.
Despite last-minute objections from Massachusetts, a coalition of Northeastern states hopes to complete a plan to mandate a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from all sources by 2020. New Mexico and Arizona are also partnering to reduce those emissions; so are the three governors of West Coast states.
These green ideas have advanced most in states that voted Democratic in 2004. But the states requiring utilities to generate more power from renewable sources include Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and even conservative, energy-producing states such as Texas, Colorado and Montana.
And these initiatives are finding champions not only among Democratic governors such as New Mexico's Bill Richardson, but also Republicans like California's Arnold Schwarzenegger (who recently said the state should produce 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010, seven years faster than current law) and New York's George E. Pataki.
On any of these fronts — stem cell research, children's healthcare, combating global warming — there's a limit to how much states and localities can accomplish without federal action. It's possible Congress or the Bush administration may try to block some of the global warming initiatives (such as the California emissions standard).
But the ideas now germinating in the states may increase the pressure on Washington to address these concerns — especially when the cycle in national politics next tilts back toward greater federal activism. When the countryside rumbles, sooner or later the capital always shakes.
See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times' website at latimes.com/brownstein. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us