Arizona shock wave

(PNI) The regular session of the Legislature was pretty ho-hum. The special session, however, was a humdinger.

Monumental things were done in the special session. A budget was passed and Medicaid expansion enacted.

Monumental things were done dramatically. The special session was called without warning to those not part of Gov. Jan Brewer's Medicaid-expansion cabal. Parliamentary guile was used to seize control of legislative proceedings and completely sideline leadership and the majority caucus.

The budget and Medicaid expansion were voted out in the shortest time allowed by the state Constitution without real debate. Brewer has said that the insurgents were even willing to formally depose leadership if required.

Even more than what was done, how it was done is likely to have political repercussions and reverberations, at least through the Republican primaries in 2014 and probably well beyond. To understand why, you have to understand how tribal American politics is.

People who are politically active tend to cluster around conservative and liberal axes. Since the Reagan realignment, the Republican Party is the vehicle for conservatives and the Democratic Party is the vehicle for liberals.

There are lots of fissures within the parties. On the Republican side, economic libertarians don't see eye to eye with social conservatives on priorities and some issues. Business and cultural populists tussle for influence. On the Democratic side, unions and environmentalists often clash. And there are tensions between what remains of pro-business Democrats and economic populists about how much and how business should be regulated.

But the ethic is that these disputes are settled within the tribe. You don't go conspiring with the other side to diminish the influence of fellow tribal members. That weakens the power of the tribe overall.

When you hear an elected official or candidate say that he is committed to bipartisanship, you are listening to canned babble intended to lure swing voters. The real intention is to increase the power of his tribe to be in a better position to crush the other tribe.

Now, many people think that the tribal nature of American politics is unproductive and silly. And that it produces undemocratic results. If a majority of the Legislature thinks Medicaid should be expanded, it should be expanded. Who cares that the majority consists of mostly Democrats and a few Republicans?

Those people have a point. But they also tend not to be nearly as politically active as those who regard politics as tribal. And for those people, the Republican members of the Medicaid cabal have breached a fundamental tribal ethic.

Something similar happened in 2004. Fifteen Republican House members sided with Democrats to pass a state budget over the objection of House leadership and a majority of the House Republican caucus. Only eight of them returned the following year. And only one of them, current state Sen. Michele Reagan of Scottsdale, is still a politician of any note.

The breach of the tribal ethic this time is much graver. In 2004, there was no special session, no seizing of control of the legislative process, no threat to dispose leadership. Moreover, a majority of Republicans in the state Senate voted to accept the House renegade budget.

Overall, Republican legislators were pretty evenly divided over that budget, 24 in favor and 32 against. On this budget, only 14 Republicans supported it and 39 opposed it. And in 2013, as opposed to 2004, a side casualty was an abortion bill strongly desired by social conservatives, who remain the most powerful force in Republican politics.

Will the political careers of those 14 suffer the same fate as the 2004 rebels? You'd have to say the odds are that they will.

Republican primaries are a place where tribal politics matter. The business community vowed to come to the rescue of any Republican facing a primary challenge because of voting for Medicaid expansion. I'll believe it when I see the money. Regardless, a Republican primary can be won even if the other side spends a lot more.

Moreover, Republican primary challengers will have a potent charge to make: The incumbent voted to implement "Obamacare" in Arizona. Brewer hates this formulation, but it's fair enough for politics. Expanding Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty level was a key component of Obamacare. And Brewer's Medicaid expansion implements it.

But here's the weird part. The budget that the Medicaid cabal passed is actually a very conservative budget. And, except for Medicaid expansion, it's pretty much the same budget legislative Republicans would have passed if the budget hadn't gotten caught up in the Medicaid-expansion melodrama.

And here's the really weird and ironic part. By voting for the budget as part of the Medicaid coup, legislative Democrats have basically signed on to the Republican approach to managing the state's way through the current rough patch. And in so doing, they've largely given up their chief campaign issue for 2014.

The coup eclipsed the nearly universal consensus that exists among legislative Republicans about fiscal policy. They saved over a billion dollars from the temporary sales tax. The plan is to largely hold the line on spending, use that surplus to paper over structural deficits over the next three years and hope revenue picks up enough to make ends meet before the surplus runs out.

The 2014 budget that passed with mostly Democratic votes implements that strategy. Democrats have been complaining for years about how Republicans have recklessly cut state spending. The budget for which they supplied the majority of the votes still funds the Department of Education $340million below its pre-recession peak; Department of Economic Security (which houses most of the state's social-welfare programs) $68million less than its peak; and the universities $357million below.

The budget Democrats voted for has not a dime for all-day kindergarten, next to nothing for school capital, and continues the waiting list for child-care subsidies.

So, how are the Democrats going to complain about Republican spending cuts when the state is spending precisely the amount for every program of state government Democrats voted to approve?

All these tribal dislocations and future turbulence could have been avoided. Republicans could have been left free to craft a budget implementing their fiscal strategy, and Democrats could have retained their political argument that it didn't spend enough.

Independent of the budget, Brewer could have forced a vote on Medicaid expansion, on which there was a natural bipartisan coalition. That could have been considerably less of a violation of tribal ethics.

But drama we had. And political turmoil we will now endure.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@ arizonarepublic.com.

Copyright 2013 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here