Though final vote tallies were not official as this was written, the political terrain in Tennessee this morning seemed pretty clear. With the GOP/tea party bandwagon rolling forcefully across the South and too many Democrats staying at home, Tennessee’s Republicans could count on expanding their political choke-hold in Nashville and growing their numerical clout in Washington.
It was a foregone conclusion that they would seize the governor’s office and solidify their hold on both chambers of the Legislature. They also were favored to convert the 5-4 Democratic majority in the congressional delegation into a 7-2 Republican majority – in addition to their hold on both U.S. Senate seats.
Whether this is a good thing for Tennessee’s citizens depends on what people want from government.
The idea that any party can be neutral about government, or can actually seek “limited government” – as so many tea party and GOP advocates claim to want – ignores a fundamental reality: there are consequences to any official action that government takes, pro or con, active or passive. As former president Bill Clinton commented last week, government is about “a set of choices.”
If government regulates or fails to regulate major industries such as banking, mining or health care, there will be a consequence for the public, for better or worse, either way. If government levies taxes or refuses to levy taxes for education, infrastructure or health care, there will be consequences either way.
Limiting government – the right wing’s catch-phrase of the moment – may sound like a fine idea in the abstract. But comes a weather disaster or terrorist strike or avalanche of salmonella-laden beef in 30 states, or a Wall Street casino or an industry-wide banking abuse that ruins businesses and pension funds, voters will want to know where government was and why it failed to safeguard the public’s interest.
Politicians must act, or not act, with regard to the public interest in what they choose, or do not choose, to regulate or appropriate funds for. In short, government is organic: it literally cannot operate in a vacuum of no impact. It must make choices, and its choices will be guided by a set of ideals about the extent to which government will act to temper the abuse or neglect of the public interest or to enhance the collective greater good.
If they have gained control of the House, Republicans in Washington who have been criticizing Washington’s so-called “out-of-control” spending will now have to decide whether they really want to let the chronically unemployed idled by the Great Recession lose their home and their COBRA health insurance, or industries to fail for lack of credit or the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” to lubricate (stimulate) markets.
If they thumb their noses at such needs, chances are they will simply further aggravate the wave of reduced consumer spending and the downward spiral of economic contraction. That way lies more joblessness, more frayed infrastructure, and more medically uninsured people whose illnesses drive up premiums for Americans still lucky enough to have jobs and health insurance.
In this sense, political action or inaction constitutes a government policy regardless of the decision to do something, or to do nothing.
In Tennessee, one immediate fear is that Republican policies regarding environmental and business issues, particularly in the banking, insurance, coal and mining and timber industries, will tilt further in favor of polluters and rapacious industry practices that disregard the consequences for public fairness, health and welfare. Republicans’ hands-off policies regarding business and environmental issues generally translates as more favors for industries that are either unfairly greedy or environmentally destructive, or both.
As for public education, Republicans also tend to favor Darwinian policies that actively disfavor pre-kindergarten classes and inner-city schools for the disadvantaged, regardless of the long-term social costs for the failure to intervene. Their stand on taxes in favor of a highly regressive sales tax structure that unfairly burdens the vast majority of Tennesseans is equally disturbing. The real winners of the anti-income tax debate are the relatively small percentage of Tennesseans with top-tier incomes.
Republicans in the South have managed to obscure the fundamental issues of tax equity, affordable health care, anti-poverty policies, job growth, and the uniformly strong public schools that are requisite for the latter, by their talk about limited government and family values. But the effect of their policies renders hollow all their limited-government bluster. The question is not one of limited government, but whether or not the general public benefits fairly from government.