Republican legislative gains tug
nation to right
04.20.2011 10:00am EDT
(Columbus, Ohio) In
state after state, Republicans are moving swiftly past blunted Democratic
opposition to turn a conservative wish-list into law. Their successes, spurred
by big election gains in November, go well beyond the spending cuts forced on
states by the fiscal crunch and tea party agitation.
Republican
governors and state legislators are bringing abortion restrictions into effect
from Virginia to Arizona, expanding gun rights north and south, pushing
polling-station photo ID laws that are anathema to Democrats and taking on
public sector unions anywhere they can.
All this as the
thinned ranks of Democrats find themselves outmaneuvered in statehouses where
they once put up a fight. In many states, they are unable to do much except
hope that voters will see these actions as an overreach by the Republicans they
elected – an accidental revolution to be reversed down the road.
A tug to the right
was in the cards ever since voters put the GOP in charge of 25 legislatures and
29 governors’ offices in the 2010 elections. That is turning out to be every
bit as key to shaping the nation’s ideological direction as anything happening
in Washington.
A close-up review of
the first wave of legislative action by Associated Press statehouse reporters
shows the striking degree to which the GOP has been able to break through
gridlock and achieve improbable ends. The historic and wildly contentious curbs
on public sector bargaining in Wisconsin, quickly followed by similar action in
Ohio, were but a signal that the status quo is being challenged on multiple
fronts in many places.
The realignment in
Florida has produced a law imposing more accountability on teachers, along with
18 proposed abortion restrictions, some bound to become law. Immigration
controls are motivating lawmakers far from borders, constitutional amendments
against gay marriage are picking up steam, Michigan and Missouri shortened the
period people can get jobless benefits and Indiana may soon have the broadest
school voucher program in the U.S.
At least 20 states
are going after public-sector benefits, pay or bargaining rights.
In Virginia,
Republicans used a deft legislative maneuver to enact a law that could close
many of the state’s 21 abortion clinics. In Missouri, a presidential swing
state where Republicans are at their strongest numbers in decades, a tax cut
sought by business for 10 years has been given final legislative approval and
Democrats are putting up little resistance to Republican priorities they once
tied in knots.
“You can’t get up on every
issue when you’re in the minority,” said state Sen. Tim Green, a Democrat from
St. Louis. “So you pick the ones you’re most passionate about.”
In North Carolina,
where Republicans won control of both legislative levers for the first time
since 1870, the party has secured approval in both chambers for charter school
expansion and a bill that would create separate crimes for the death or injury
of a fetus at any stage of development, not including legal abortions.
Republicans have made unexpected progress in giving gun owners more rights to
carry concealed pistols.
North Carolina is
also among nearly a dozen states where an initiative to require photo IDs at
polls is getting traction. Democrats and civil libertarians worry photo ID
rules would suppress minority and legal immigrant voting.
Conservatives welcome
the pace and breadth of it all. “When you have one side that’s been put out in
the legislative wilderness, there’s a lot of pent-up ideas that are going to
move quickly,” said Dallas Woodhouse, director of Americans for Prosperity in
North Carolina.
Even solidly
Democratic Vermont is coming up a paler shade of blue as legislators seek cuts
in spending on the elderly and disabled after shelving a plan to raise taxes on
the rich. The squeeze on state budgets and the shaky economy are forcing
lawmakers of both parties to rethink the usual partisan prescriptions.
“In the context of
that kind of a fiscal reality, I think agendas become a little bit more
polarized and opportunities for finding the kind of adjustments on the margins
become less and less,” said political scientist Philip Russo of Ohio’s Miami
University.
In bellwether Ohio,
new Republican Gov. John Kasich burst out of the gate with a plan, now law, to
hand over job creation functions from the government to a nonprofit corporation
whose board he chairs. Bills that would have met quick death under Democratic
control have advanced under Republican majorities – none more apparent than the
law to curtail the collective bargaining rights of more than 350,000 public
workers.
Democrats in Ohio are
complaining about “one-party rule” and want buyer’s remorse legislation that
would help voters recall lawmakers who are doing things they didn’t elect them
to do. Their chances of getting it are close to zero.
So is a conservative
tide sweeping the nation?
If so, historian
Doris Kearns Goodwin sees it as a tide that can wash out as fast as it rushed
in.
Sitting in the State
Room of the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, where she had come for a historical
event, Goodwin said declining party loyalty has accelerated shifts in public
opinion and swings of the pendulum. She recalled the Democratic statehouse
gains of 2008, the year of Barack Obama. “We thought in 2008, many pundits did,
that that meant a progressive era was coming in; now everybody’s talking about
a conservative era in the states and maybe in the nation,” she said.
“When one whole party
comes in, and they come in having been out before, there’s that flush of
victory that makes them think this is our time, whether they’re Democrats or
Republicans, to get through what we want to get through.”
In South Carolina,
where Republicans are fashioning further restrictions to one of the country’s
toughest immigration enforcement laws, Democrats have mostly dropped the
delaying tactics they once used with relish. The Democratic opposition has
essentially vaporized in Tennessee, Kansas and Oklahoma, too.
In Oklahoma, where
the GOP controls both chambers and the governor’s office for the first time in
history, Republicans are making sweeping changes to the state’s civil justice
system, shoring up the state’s pension system by making workers contribute more
and work longer, and aiming to eliminate bargaining rights for municipal
workers in the state’s seven largest cities.
“They’re power mad,”
said Democratic lawmaker Richard Morrissette of Oklahoma City. “They weren’t
out there campaigning on the idea of consolidating power. They know they have
control of the House, the Senate and the governor’s office, and they’re ramming
this stuff through just because they can.”
If Republicans are
overreaching, it’s also true that voters did not elect them to govern like
Democrats.
“All this should come
as no surprise to people,” said New Hampshire GOP lawmaker Gene Chandler. With
supermajorities in both chambers, giving them a stronger hand against a
Democratic governor, GOP legislators in the state have passed bills to shift
more public employee pension costs to workers and opt for spending cuts over
tax increases. They’ve also approved legislation to expand the right to use
deadly force in self-defense.
It’s not all coming
up tulips for the tea party or the social conservatives, however. New Mexico
and Utah are among Republican-led states where governors are bypassing the GOP
playbook. The tea party movement is in tatters in Colorado and not much better
off in Alaska.
In Montana,
Republican leaders are struggling to keep their eye on the big picture –
cutting spending, developing natural resources – while the swollen GOP freshman
class peppers the debate with calls to nullify federal laws, create an armed
citizen’s militia, legalize spear hunting, force FBI agents to get a sheriff’s
OK before arresting anyone, and more.
“Stop scaring our
constituents and stop letting us look like buffoons,” veteran Republican
lawmaker Walt McNutt told the aggressive newcomers.
Gov. Brian
Schweitzer, not one of the Democrats to roll over, came up with a cattle brand
that reads “VETO” and seems itching to use it. “Ain’t nobody in the history of
Montana has had so many danged ornery critters,” he said.