When I was growing up, I heard people claim they liked it when we had a President from one party and a Congress controlled by the other one.
Depending on how cynical they were, they would say things like, “both parties are gangs of thieves, and we are safer with them watching each other,” to, “well, if neither party controls everything, that will force them to work together for the common good.”
Well, it’s hard to tell whether divided government ever leads to some kind of enforced honesty, but back in the day the parties did work together on some issues, especially foreign policy and trade agreements, et cetera, far more than they do now.
That’s in part because for forty years, from 1955 to 1995, Democrats always controlled the House of Representatives, and for all but six years, held the Senate as well.
But Republicans had the White House for 26 of those 40 years, and in order for pretty much anything to get done the two parties had to find a way to work together.
There was also the quaint idea in both Washington and Lansing that, at some level, the good of the nation or the state was more important than narrow partisan concerns. It’s important not to romanticize the past too much. There were plenty of narrow partisans, crooks, ignoramuses and time-servers back in the day.
But you had a corps of people, generally those who had been there longer than term limits now allow, who had something that, for want of a better word, I’d call patriotism. And it may have been true that in the old days, there was something positive about having parties with different perspectives share power.
But today, that’s clearly not the case. Take a look at what’s going on in Lansing. Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s main campaign issue was “fixing the damn roads.”
She won by a near-landslide, as did other Democratic candidates for statewide office. Democrats probably would have also won control of both houses of the legislature if it hadn’t been for gerrymandering, something the voters also decided to outlaw.
Everyone knows, and knew during the campaign, that fixing the roads will require raising revenue, which means, in plain English, more taxes.
But it’s also perfectly clear that car repairs and simple wear and tear from bad roads are costing us more than any tax increase would.
We need, every expert agrees, to come up with an extra $2 billion or more a year just to get our roads to the point where they won’t hurt our economy further. Governor Whitmer has proposed gradually raising the gas tax by 45 cents a gallon.
That makes total sense to me. The price of gasoline has been fluctuating wildly for years, and this increase would seem relatively normal. There’s a rough justice too, in that those who drive the most would pay the most; it is basically a user fee.
But the Republicans announced they won’t even think about it, and will unveil their “plan” for roads later this summer. For now, they want to take more out of the state’s general fund next fiscal year, which likely means robbing things like education and foster care to divert a couple hundred millions to the roads.
This is, of course, insanity. Our state is falling apart, largely because of an inflexible ideology that says all tax increases are bad, even if they save us money in the long run, as this one would do. The problem is that one party has no interest in contributing to “government;” they care only for partisan advantage.
The end of gerrymandering can’t get here fast enough. The only questions are whether voters will remember, and Michigan survive till 2023.
