Brookings: Experts - Jonathan Rauch

The Politics of Marijuana Legalization

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:00:00 -0400

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May 29, 2013
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
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Last November, Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize marijuana, and they may not be the last: legalization now has the support of about half the country, up from 25 percent two decades ago. But legalization remains controversial among the public and contrary to federal law and policy. Is a new national consensus emerging, or a new stage of the culture war? Either way, what are the implications?

On May 29th, Governance Studies at Brookings and the Washington Office on Latin America hosted a public forum to discuss changing attitudes towards marijuana legalization. Brookings Senior Fellows William Galston and E.J. Dionne presented findings of a detailed study of evidence from opinion surveys, some of it newly available.

Follow the conversation at #MJLegalization.

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The Politics of Marijuana Legalization

Marijuana Legalization: Early Lessons from Colorado and Washington

Beth Stone and Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:16:00 -0400

Last November, in defiance of federal law, the states of Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana. What are the two states learning from implementation efforts so far?

On May 21, Governance Studies at Brookings and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) held a Congressional briefing and released the paper Q&A: Legal Marijuana in Colorado and Washington. The related event and paper are products of a partnership between Brookings and WOLA focused on the marijuana legalization policy debate.

The panelists were Jack Finlaw (chief legal counsel for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper), Alison Holcomb (drug policy director, ACLU of Washington State), and Mark A. R. Kleiman (professor of public policy, UCLA). Congressmen Jared Polis (D-Colorado) and Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee) provided additional remarks. John Walsh of WOLA moderated the discussion.

Panelists said the states confront challenges in implementing legal marijuana, especially with respect to the issues of taxation, quality control and underage use:

Holcomb mentioned that Washington, in particular, faces challenges because, unlike Colorado, it did not start with a well developed regulatory structure for medical marijuana, so it can’t “copy and paste” specific policies.
Finlaw emphasized the difficulties faced by marijuana retailers who, due to marijuana’s illegal status under federal laws, often cannot conduct their businesses through banks. They also cannot deduct businesses expenses from their federal taxes. Both problems make it harder for Colorado to regulate and tax the industry.
Holcomb agreed on the tax issue and said that there is more work to be done on amending the federal law, particularly as attorneys are actually advising some marijuana dealers not to pay taxes in order to avoid self-incrimination under federal law.
Kleiman discussed the testing of marijuana products for quality and composition. He said this process is very difficult because no one audits the testing firms, especially troubling because they insist, “We’re honest, but everyone else cheats.”
Kleiman also pointed out that the more careful a state tries to be in laying down and enforcing clear rules for marijuana production and distribution, the more vulnerable it is to federal intervention. He also warned that policy makers in this space should be wary of making promises they can’t keep, particularly when it comes to underage marijuana use.

Join Governance Studies at Brookings for an event next week, Wednesday, May 29, where Jonathan Rauch, E.J. Dionne, William Galston and others will speak on the politics of marijuana legalization and release a new study on marijuana, generational change and the future.

Watch the video of the event below »

Authors

Beth Stone
Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Nick Adams / Reuters

Conservative Case for Gay Marriage

Jonathan Rauch — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:03:00 -0400

"It became a cascade." Dale Carpenter, a friend who e-mailed those words from Minneapolis, was writing about the unexpectedly lopsided vote for same-sex marriage in the Minnesota House last week (the state Senate approved it Monday, and the governor has signed it), but he might have been writing about the whole marriage movement.

This month, Rhode Island and Delaware approved gay marriage. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court could restore it in California. If that happens, nearly 30% of the population will live in gay-marriage states.

The cascade extends beyond marriage. America is rethinking its whole relationship with its gay citizens. This month, a poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found not only a 55% majority supporting marriage equality, but also even bigger majorities in favor of allowing openly gay Boy Scouts and opposed to banning gay Scout leaders. As for NBA center Jason Collins' public announcement that he's gay, it isn't even controversial: It enjoys 68% approval.

To understand why the public is breaking so fast for same-sex marriage, look not at "blue" (Democratic-leaning) states that recently approved it. Glance instead at deep-red South Carolina.

There, on the same day that Delaware's Senate passed marriage equality, the voters of the first congressional district sent former Republican governor and congressman Mark Sanford back to the House seat he occupied in the late 1990s.

Now, this is not a man who has done right by marriage. Rather, he used it as a doormat. As governor, Sanford took a mistress, then disappeared for days on a visit to her in Argentina and lied about it. He lost his job and his marriage. But last week, the voters chose to overlook both his infidelity and his mendacity. They even overlooked Sanford's putting his mistress (now fiancée) onstage at a campaign event with his 14-year-old son, whom news accounts described as "visibly uncomfortable."

The voters of South Carolina are entitled to shrug off Sanford's connubial escapades, but many other people notice a conservative double standard. No matter how hard gays work to be true to our life partners, we don't qualify for marriage. But no matter how shabbily straights treat their vows, they qualify not only for marriage but also for Congress.

When millions of Americans see straight people busting up marriages while gay people struggle to form them, they draw the obvious, and correct, conclusion. America needs more marriages, not fewer. The threat to marriage in the USA today comes not from gays' trying to marry but from straights' failing to get married and stay married.

Researchers find that blue states have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than red states do. "If you're looking for solid marriages," as the (conservative) New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written, "head to Massachusetts, not Alabama." Why? Gay marriage probably isn't reducing straight divorce rates, at least not much. But it is part and parcel of a re-commitment to family values, not a flight from them.

Same-sex marriage is socially conservative in that sense — and in a deeper sense, too. The movement is about equality and rights, yes, but it is also about responsibility and obligation. Marriage joins couples not just in a contract with each other but also in a pact with their community, their kids, their God and millenniums of custom. Gay and lesbian Americans yearn for those bonds.

The father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, famously said society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." In seeking marriage, gays are asking to join Burke's mighty stream of tradition. They are asking to be constrained, not liberated: to be tied to a commitment larger than themselves, larger even than each other.

That is why same-sex marriage is cascading. The public looks at marriage equality and sees the greatest social conservative movement of our time. And, at least outside South Carolina, it looks at Mark Sanford and sees something else.

Republished from USA Today >>

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: USA Today

How Not to Die: Revolutionizing End-of-Life Health Care

Jonathan Rauch — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:32:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: This short blog post is based on the longer The Atlantic article, “How Not to Die,” by Jonathan Rauch. It focuses on revolutionizing end-of-life care by utilizing entrepreneurs in the medical system.

Here in Washington, we talk obsessively about reforming health care as something the government needs to do. Which it surely does. But one thing we forget is that a lot of reform is coming up from the grassroots, and this bottom-up reform, by showing the way forward, will be every bit as important as top-down reform, and a lot less subject to political gridlock.

Example: Dr. Angelo Volandes, of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, has a gold-plated medical-establishment pedigree. But he’s also a zealous reformer who believes that much of the treatment administered to people nearing the end of life is not only unnecessary but, much worse, actually unwanted—because patients are not given the information they need in order to set treatment goals. He and colleagues are pioneering short, easily understandable videos that illustrate treatment options and goals of care visually, giving patients a clearer idea of what their choices really are.

Read about it here. The U.S. medical system is not friendly to disruptive entrepreneurs. But if we're going to improve value, reduce medical inflation, and make patients' experiences better, we'll need to make the most of entrepreneurs like Volandes.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Marijuana Legalization: Are There Alternatives to State-Federal Conflict?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0400

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April 15, 2013
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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Last November, two states, Colorado and Washington, voted to legalize and regulate marijuana--a direct challenge to federal policy under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Other states may follow suit. Now the Obama administration, the states and Congress face a series of legal and political choices that will determine whether some degree of orderly cooperation is possible. Can confrontation be avoided, or at least minimized? If not, what are the implications?

On April 15, Governance Studies at Brookings and the Washington Office on Latin America hosted a public forum with two leading scholars and two key politicians to examine the options and weigh the stakes.
Video

Stuart S. Taylor, Jr.: There Needs to Be Cooperation Between State and Federal Government
Mark A.R. Kleiman: We Really Don’t Know How “Legalized” Marijuana Would Fit Into Our Society
Bob Ferguson: The State of Washington Wants to Go Forward with Its Policies Regarding Marijuana Use
Rep. Earl Blumenauer: Our Current Marijuana Policy Has Failed

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20130415_marijuana_federalism_transcript

Let’s Go Down the Aisle Toward Legalized Pot

Jonathan Rauch — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:09:00 -0400

The recent finding, in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, that support for same-sex marriage has reached a remarkable 58 percent of Americans should make the Obama administration think hard. Not about same-sex marriage but about marijuana.

Anytime now, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to make an announcement about marijuana, one of the administration’s trickier policy problems. In November, two states, Colorado and Washington, passed ballot initiatives — by strong margins — to legalize marijuana use. Both states established regulatory systems akin to those for alcohol, though Washington’s is somewhat more stringent. And both states acted in defiance of federal marijuana policy: The 1970 Controlled Substances Act makes marijuana illegal and places it in the same class as heroin.

How should the administration respond to this frontal challenge? The answer is: View it not as a threat but as an opportunity.

Many drug warriors disagree. They want the federal government to threaten state-licensed marijuana growers and distributors, and their bankers and landlords, with criminal enforcement. Several former directors of the Drug Enforcement Administration recently called on President Obama to launch a lawsuit preempting the states’ actions, much as he did in challenging Arizona’s immigration law a few years ago. (The Supreme Court delivered a mixed ruling on that challenge.)

Squashing the states, however, is easier said than done. All but a small fraction of the people who enforce the marijuana laws work for state and local governments and answer to state law. Although states cannot break federal law, neither must they step in and enforce it. Federal prosecutors probably could shut down regulated marijuana distributors in Colorado and Washington with relative ease by sending threatening letters to landlords and bankers. But that would leave those states, and others that follow, with the option of legalizing marijuana without regulating it, because unconditional legalization under state law is indisputably within the states’ power. The effect of removing states’ troops from the battlefield would be to strand the federal government with marijuana laws it could not enforce.

The chaos that might result would be counterproductive even (or especially) for drug hawks. Instead of shutting down the states’ experiments, then, the federal government might better serve the policy goals of the Controlled Substances Act by working with Colorado and Washington to concentrate federal and state enforcement on high federal priorities, such as preventing legalized marijuana from spilling across state borders.

There is another, more positive, case for cooperation as well. It is best understood by looking at the lessons of same-sex marriage.

In a number of important respects, marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage track closely. Both are controversial social issues about which public opinion has changed dramatically in the past few years; on both issues, polls show the public closely divided but tipping toward legalization.

Moreover, for both issues, young people are driving the trend; older opponents of legalizing both are exiting the scene. The issues’ demographics suggest that public opinion is virtually certain to continue shifting. A true national consensus, however, remains some distance away, and partisan and regional differences are sharp.

In recent years, the country has pushed many controversial issues — abortion, crime, education — up to the federal level. But same-sex marriage has taken the opposite path, with leadership left to the states. The result, though somewhat messy as policy, has been a remarkable political success at a time when the country has few to boast of. That some states could try same-sex marriage without betting the whole country reduced the stakes and contained the conflict. States’ experiments with gay marriage educed valuable information about its real-world consequences, or lack thereof, allowing for a better-informed, more rational debate.

Above all, localizing the dispute gave people across the country time to work out what they think and to adjust policies as public opinion changed. Had the country locked in a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the mid-2000s, policy and public opinion would today be drifting inexorably into conflict.

State leadership on marijuana policy has all of the same advantages as on marriage. It contains conflict by reducing the stakes; educes knowledge about what happens if marijuana policy is changed; and allows incremental adjustment to social change. For the federal government, yielding some measure of control over marijuana policy to the states is not a threat; it is an opportunity to manage change and preserve options. Painting federal policy into a corner serves no one, not even drug warriors.

There is, however, an important difference between marriage and marijuana. States have run family policy since colonial times; letting them lead on marriage was the default option. Marijuana will be much harder. The federal government has led the war on drugs for decades, and its ban on marijuana is written into not just federal statute but also into several international treaties as well.

Avoiding a state-federal train wreck over marijuana policy will not happen automatically. Finding a cooperative path requires creativity and energy from both levels of government. But the alternative won’t satisfy anyone, at least not for long.

Editor's note: This article by Jonathan Rauch originally appeared in the Washington Post. He is the author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.”

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: Washington Post
Image Source: © Anthony Bolante / Reuters

Washington Versus Washington (and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy

Jonathan Rauch — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:29:00 -0400

When Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana by decisive margins in initiatives last November, they set up not just one but two conflicts. The first, of course, is about drug policy. No less important, albeit less widely noticed, is a conflict about power. To what extent can and should the states act independently of the federal government on an issue with national ramifications? The choices that Colorado and both Washingtons make over the coming months are likely to affect the course not only of drug policy but of state-federal relations for years to come.

The American public is closely divided on whether marijuana should be legal. But it has a clear preference on the question of how to decide. In three recent polls that asked whether the federal government or the states should decide—or, in a different wording, whether the federal government should let Colorado and Washington implement their legalizations—respondents favored state leadership by margins ranging from 14 to 25 percentage points. Significantly, CBS News, in November, found that even among those who oppose legalizing marijuana (47 percent—the same percentage as favored legalizing), 49 percent thought the states should be allowed to decide.[1]

This paper argues that the public’s preference is well grounded. Specifically, it makes three points. First, the clash over marijuana, far from being anomalous, is the latest and greatest in an escalating series of state-federal confrontations on hot-button issues. If not handled with care, it could lead to legal confusion, policy incoherence, and political resentment. Law by itself cannot decide how to proceed; there is no avoiding making political choices which determine whether and how the federal government and states will cooperate or collide.

Second, in making those choices, a good place to look for insight is to same-sex marriage. Though the two issues are substantively and legally very different, from a political point of view their similarities are quite striking. With same-sex marriage, a state-led approach has been a remarkable success, particularly at containing social conflict and adapting deliberately to social change. Most of the reasons for that success also apply to marijuana legalization.

Third, letting states lead on marijuana decision-making is legally more difficult than letting them lead on marriage, and it is politically less natural. State leadership was the default option with marriage; for marijuana it will take hard work and a willingness to stretch. That said, the work is worth doing. Trying to impose and sustain a one-size-fits all, top-down resolution from Washington, D.C., is likely to be too unsustainable and inflexible to succeed.

Download and read the full paper »

[1] CBS News Poll, Nov. 16-19, 2011. Published November 29, 2012

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Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Cliff DesPeaux / Reuters

Gay Marriage Hits the Supreme Court

Jonathan Rauch — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:59:00 -0400

Listening to the Supreme Court's arguments on the big gay marriage case—which will decide if California, or for that matter any other state, can forbid same-sex marriage, as California's Proposition 8 did in 2008—I was struck by the baldly political nature of the conversation.

"Baldly political" usually means something bad, such as unprincipled horsetrading. But in this case it means something good. The court just didn't have enough clear law to decide the questions before it. So it had to do what the Supreme Court must do, and indeed should do, when law can't settle the problem. It openly considered the political consequences of its decisions.

Gay marriage doesn't fit any existing judicial template, except an old case from 1971, which the court rightly dismissed as obsolete. It doesn't neatly fit civil-rights decisions overturning, for example, racial discrimination, because society has always (rightly or wrongly) viewed male+female as intrinsic to the nature of marriage in a way that white+white is not. But it also doesn't fit another branch of jurisprudence requiring the court to uphold any law that a legislature might conceivably believe is rational, because a simple "rational basis" review would open the door to tyranny of the majority against gays, which the court forbade in 1996.

So, to its credit, the court decided to look at the underlying politics. Three political arguments were before it:

1. Plaintiffs: Gay equality has come to be accepted as a civil right. That wasn't true a few years ago, but now that it is true, the court should recognize that reality rather than continuing to hurt gay couples (and their kids).

2. Defendants: The debate about gay equality is ongoing, especially with regard to marriage. The country is still making up its mind. It's premature for the Supreme Court to jump in and take the decision out of the political process.

3. The Obama administration: It depends. If a state is still debating gay equality, maybe it can ban gay marriage. But if it has already plumped for gay equality on every other front—as California had done with civil unions, gay adoption, and antidiscrimination protections—it cannot then justify withholding equality in marriage.

Each of these political arguments is problematic—not because they are political, but because all of them slice the baby in an uncomfortable direction. You could hear this clearly in the justices' collective groping for answers they couldn't find.

No. 1 seemed too broad. It implies that the court has no choice but to order gay marriage everywhere, right now, forever. Justice Kennedy, the likely swing vote and often gay-friendly in other contexts, sounded reluctant to go there. "You're really asking...us to go into uncharted waters," he said. Even Justice Sotomayor, presumed to be a liberal vote, had problems with the broad ruling, asking unhappily, "If you say that [gay] marriage is a fundamental right, what state restrictions could ever exist?"

But No. 2 is too narrow. It implies that the voters can treat gay people just about as badly as they please, at least if they can cite a tradition of treating them badly in the past. Not even the pro-Proposition 8 lawyer, Charles Cooper, was comfortable with that. He looked for a limiting principle but had trouble finding one. And he did himself no favors by citing as a sufficiently "rational basis" an argument which the court (correctly) didn't find very rational, namely that the state can justifiably bar infertile couples from marrying—but only if they are gay.

No. 3 is just, well, a bit weird. Legally it may be coherent, but politically it penalizes states that try to find a compromise on marriage. On the "all or nothing" principle, it's constitutional to discriminate against gays, provided you discriminate to the maximum extent possible. As Justice Sotomayor noted drily, "There is an irony in that." Justice Breyer seemed incredulous.

The justices did show a lot of interest in a fourth option: an off-ramp. They would decide that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the case, because California had chosen not to appeal a district court's decision overturning Proposition 8. The effect would be to knock down California's gay-marriage ban on a technicality, without affecting the rest of the country.

Politically the off-ramp presents problems of its own. As several justices pointed out, it implies that if state officials don't like the result of a voter initiative, they could subvert it by defending it badly, baiting a court to overturn it, and then choosing not to appeal.

So: the law is unhelpful, but the politics are hard. But if I had to guess, I'd say that option 4, the off-ramp, will look less unappealing that the other three options. I didn't see five votes for anything else.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Cliff DesPeaux / Reuters

Washington vs. Washington (and Colorado): Who Should Decide About Marijuana?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:00:00 -0500

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January 8, 2013
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM EST
Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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This program was broadcast live on C-SPAN2 and streamed at c-span.org.

Two states' recent legalization of marijuana, in defiance of federal drug laws, is creating a new flashpoint in federal-state relations. When the will of a state's voters comes into direct conflict with the will of Congress, is it wiser for the federal government to seek accommodation or to come down hard in defense of its prerogatives? Who gets to decide, and why?

On January 8, Governance Studies at Brookings and the Washington Office on Latin America hosted a forum on what is at stake in this potential confrontation over legalized marijuana and how best to resolve it. A panel of experts discussed the importance of how the marijuana dispute is handled and how this may influence the federal-state balance on a host of other issues.

Related Event: Legal Marijuana? New Domestic and International Initiatives Challenge the Status Quo
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Jonathan Rauch: The Federal Government Needs Time to Figure Out the Marijuana Legalization Issue
Michael Greve: No State Has to Criminalize Marijuana
Angela Hawken: It's Not a Question of If States Will Legalize Marijuana, But When
Troy Eid: There Will Be Winners and Losers in the Marijuana Legalization Debate
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The Supreme Court Takes Up Same-Sex Marriage

Jonathan Rauch — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 10:28:00 -0500

I'm not sure what the headline writer at the New York Times meant by saying that the issue of same-sex marriage "pushes justices into overdrive." I suspect "underdrive" may be more like it.

The court agreed last Friday to take two landmark gay-marriage cases. In one, lower courts overturned Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. In the other, lower courts overturned the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which barred any federal recognition of states' same-sex marriages.

Bookmakers must be in clover with these two cases, because there are so many possible permutations to bet on. The court could go as far as to overturn DOMA and order national gay marriage as a constitutional right. It could go almost as far in the other direction, upholding DOMA and foreclosing not only gay couples' constitutional claim to marriage but gay individuals' claim that homosexuality is entitled to constitutional protection from discrimination. So, yes, the court could go into "overdrive." Attentive court-watchers, however, note two things:

The court asked to be briefed on whether the litigants in both cases have proper standing to sue, a question opened up by some unusual details of the two cases. The court, this suggests, is considering dismissing all the claims and just ducking out. That would probably leave California with gay marriage and the federal government with DOMA. Outside California, hardly anything would be changed.

In the case testing Proposition 8, the Ninth Circuit U.S. appeals court already narrowed the case to just being about California. That decision, too, gives the Supremes an easy way to turn a big national case into a much smaller local one.

It's possible to imagine a pair of five-four decisions giving gay-rights activists everything they want, with Justice Anthony Kennedy as swing vote and Justice Antonin Scalia writing the most scathing dissent of his frequently scathing career. Maybe, as conservatives have suggested, Kennedy is determined to write himself into the history books as the patron saint of gay rights.

But my guess—just a guess, of course, because who knows—is that Chief Justice John Roberts will nudge the court toward a broad consensus around narrow decisions, rather than vice versa. I can even imagine him getting unanimity for a ruling, in the Proposition 8 case, that tells everyone to come back with another case at some point in the future—when, not incidentally, the country will be closer to a consensus.

Getting the court's liberals to uphold DOMA, which has been roundly rejected by lower courts, is more of a stretch. Still, here's a possibility to bear in mind about the bang of the court's decision to take these two polarizing cases: it might well end with a depolarizing whimper.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

The No Good, Very Bad Outlook for the Working-Class American Man

Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

If the American economy were an automobile, you would say the transmission is failing. The engine works, but not all wheels are getting power. To put the matter less metaphorically: The economy no longer reliably and consistently transmits productivity gains to workers. The result is that many millions of Americans, in particular less-skilled men, are leaving the workforce, a phenomenon the country has never seen before on the present scale.

Well. That was a mouthful. It certainly bites off more than Washington’s polarized politicians can handle at the moment. In the next few months, they need to worry about the so-called fiscal cliff, the round of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that, if not averted, might start a recession. Plus a politically vexing debt-limit bill, which will need to be passed early in 2013. Plus a recovery that, for many Americans, feels more like a recession. (The median family income fell as much during the first two years of the recovery as it did during the two years of the recession itself, according to the Pew Research Center.) Plus a debt crisis and downturn in Europe. Isn’t that enough?

Read the full piece on The National Journal »

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: National Journal
Image Source: © Carlos Barria / Reuters

Post-Election Day Analysis – What Happened and What Comes Next?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0500

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November 7, 2012
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST
Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

On November 7, the Campaign 2012 project at Brookings hosted a final forum analyzing the election’s outcomes and how these results could affect the policy agenda of the next administration and Congress. Panelists discussed the approach of the second Obama term, the political makeup of the new 113th Congress and the prospect for policy breakthroughs on key social, fiscal and foreign policy issues.
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Thomas Mann: Extreme Partisanship Will Likely Continue
Isabel Sawhill: The Republican Party Remains Divided
Robert Kagan: President Obama Is Facing a Very Challenging Second Term
Jonathan Rauch: It Was an Incredible Win for the Democrats
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Breakthrough! Gay Marriage Is Now Mainstream

Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:30:00 -0500

On most dimensions, 2012 was a collective shrug: an equivocal status quo election. The voters didn't like the situation, but they also didn't change it. They doubted that either of the presidential candidates could fix it. So they went with divided government and leaving bad enough alone.

Gay Americans are the exception. The big exception. For them the election was the culminating breakthrough of a breakthrough year.

Going into the election, gay marriage supporters had lost every state referendum or initiative on the issue, more than 30 in all. It was the most perfect record of failure in modern American politics. Assuming the preliminary tallies all hold, this year produced perfect success. Three states—Maine, Maryland, and Washington—passed referenda affirmatively enacting same-sex marriage by public plebiscite. One other, Minnesota, rejected a constitutional ban. That’s four for four.

National polls began to show inconsistent pluralities or even majorities for gay marriage a couple of years ago, and moral disapproval of same-sex relationships—the single best indicator of antagonism toward homosexuality—shifted below 50 percent around the same time. But changing public opinion didn't immediately filter into electoral politics, partly because opponents of gay marriage were more passionate on the issue than (nongay) proponents, and partly because the polls tended to overstate real-world support for gay rights.

Now the politics have crossed over to where the polls are. The nation's argument over marriage is not over. But between President Obama's historic endorsement of it in May (he is gay people's LBJ), the Democratic Party's embrace of it in its platform this past summer, and now the electorate's imprimatur in all the states where it was tested, gay marriage is mainstream and will never return to the backwaters.

Politically, Republicans are increasingly in the position of a battallion pinned down by friendly fire. Social conservatives will continue to treat opposition to gay marriage as a litmus test, but that same opposition will be increasingly unattractive to younger and moderate voters that the party needs to attract as its base of white conservatives shrinks. So the party, on gay rights, is where Democrats used to be: torn between two constituencies it can’t afford to lose. Democrats, on the other hand, have come to see gay rights as a political winner and, if anything, will deepen their commitment. Those trends were evident but implicit until November 6. They are quite explicit now.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Gary Cameron / Reuters

Legal Marijuana? New Domestic and International Initiatives Challenge the Status Quo

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:00:00 -0400

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October 3, 2012
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT
Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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Marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug in the United States and around the world. The approach to marijuana enshrined in U.S. law and in the UN drug control regime—complete prohibition of production, sale, and use—is facing unprecedented challenges. Last year Gallup found that half of Americans supported the idea of making marijuana legal, up from 34 percent in 2001. This November, voters in the states of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington will consider ballot measures that would legalize marijuana. Meanwhile, the Uruguayan government has introduced legislation that would legalize and regulate the marijuana market in that country.

On October 3, in collaboration with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a forum examining the renewed debate over marijuana policy in the United States and abroad. A panel of experts, including the authors of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2012), considered the potential consequences of a shift to legal marijuana, including the variety of regulatory control options, possible federal responses to state-level policy changes, the interplay between U.S. marijuana policy and Mexican drug trafficking and violence, and the significance of marijuana legalization initiatives for the international drug control regime.
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A Plan that Offers Obama a Fighting Chance

Jonathan Rauch — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

At this point in 1980, Jimmy Carter was on the path to oblivion but didn’t know it. Barack Obama may share Carter’s fate if he doesn’t change course soon.

The 1980 presidential race was neck and neck until the end. It finally broke for Ronald Reagan when voters concluded that Carter could not cope with the economy and that Reagan, despite his conspicuous flaws as a candidate, was a viable alternative.

The Obama campaign is in a similar position. It might eke out a victory, but it is at risk of losing control of the economic narrative. Its best hope is to stop nickel-and-diming Mitt Romney and laundry-listing forgettable initiatives and, instead, give independents reason to think that Obama has a clear, viable plan to bolster the economy.

This election will be decided largely by independent voters, most of whom can probably tell you that Mitt Romney’s economic plan is to repeal Obamacare and shrink the government. It may not make much sense, but it’s clear. Ask what Obama’s plan is, and they won’t be certain. They will know, however, that what he has done hasn’t worked. And by the fall, many independents will have made up their minds.

The president’s failure, so far, to show that he understands the scope of the economy’s problems and knows how to fix them does not stem from having nothing to say: investment in education, energy, innovation and infrastructure are reasonable things. But they are also slow-acting, small-bore stuff. Such talk does not include additional economic stimulus, an element that many economists, especially Democratic-leaning ones, consider crucial to prevent a double-dip recession. Nor does it deal realistically with long-term growth in spending.

So Obama should draw a map and send it to Capitol Hill in the form of a bill — a president’s strongest statement that he intends action. A big legislative proposal can frame the issue and paint Obama’s intentions in bold colors. It should include three elements:

1) Long-term fiscal retrenchment. The easiest and best way is to adopt the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan. The Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations have been established as a credible bipartisan solution. Adopting its plan outright would signal that Obama is not playing partisan games and would redress the (justified) criticism that he has finessed the deficit. Not least, Simpson-Bowles compares favorably on grounds of balance, economic plausibility and public appeal with the budget of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which Romney endorsed.

2) Short-term economic stimulus. Republicans will howl about more spending. Let them. Stimulus measures make sense when unemployment is high and the world is teetering on the edge of a second recession. And provided they are coupled with a credible long-term retrenchment, they are politically and economically defensible. Such measures have a further political advantage: Obama and the Democrats would be running on what they believe is the right answer, instead of running away from it.

3) A two-year debt-limit extension. Declare that another debt-limit fiasco is unacceptable and demand that the issue be taken off the table. Let Republicans explain why they want to hold a gun to the economy’s head.

Could Obama get something like this enacted before Election Day? Of course not. Could he even get it voted on? Possibly. Would he be justified in putting the package before Congress and demanding action? Absolutely. Doing so would show that he knows the economy is in trouble, that he believes the status quo is unacceptable and that he is determined to act.

One other advantage: Setting forth a boldly enunciated, easily graspable program puts Obama in a stronger position to criticize Romney’s plan as dangerously contractionary. Instead of going for Romney’s capillaries (his years-old record as governor; his even-older record at Bain Capital), Obama could go for the jugular by drawing a contrast that should be at the campaign’s core: The Republicans’ mistimed, precipitous austerity threatens to bring on another recession.

Obama could attempt to squeak through the election with a campaign modeled on, ironically, that of George W. Bush in 2004. Bush sowed just enough doubt about his challenger, and managed to pick off just enough swing voters in key states, to eke out victory. Obama is doing something like that now.

But the economic head winds Obama is fighting are much stronger than those faced by Bush, and his approval ratings are lower. In any case, a narrow victory based on electoral salami-slicing and negative advertising would leave Obama without a clear mandate or agenda for his second term. Ask Bush how that works out.

Time is short, Mr. President. Carterdom beckons.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: The Washington Post
Image Source: © Jim Young / Reuters

The Supreme Court's Affordable Care Act Decision: An "Act of Judicial Statesmanship"

Jonathan Rauch — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:09:00 -0400

Minutes after today's health-care decision comes down from the Supreme Court, a conservative legal scholar I know emails: "Just beginning to read [Chief Justice John] Roberts's opinion, which may be deservedly remembered as a great act of judicial statesmanship." I concur. Roberts and the four concurring justices have managed to be neither a rubber stamp nor a heavy hand. Improbably, they have written a decision that everyone can live with.

There is lots of good legal writing in the various opinions issued today; the Supreme Court is at the top of its game. The big story, though, is that what prevailed was not any particular legal argument but a kind of meta-doctrine about what the court should and shouldn't be in the business of doing. As the majority ruling pointedly notes, the court's first job is to look for ways to uphold democratically enacted statutes, not for ways to knock them down. If it can plausibly construe a law in a way that's constitutional, it usually should.

Of course, "usually" doesn't mean "always." But in this decision the court, and Roberts, avoided the swing-for-the-fences activist temptation which they have succumbed to recently on campaign finance. In the health-care case, Roberts is behaving more like the cautious conservator of the court's institutional role that he promised to be. Let's hope we see more of this chief justice, and less of the guy who wrote Citizens United.

How will it play? Well, I think.

If I'm a liberal Democrat, I'm obviously relieved that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was upheld. According to the court, the controversial requirement that everyone get health insurance or pay $700 to the IRS is constitutional as an exercise of Congress's taxing power. Which is OK by me, because, whatever Congress may have called the mandate, it looked, walked, and quacked like a tax. Phew.

If I'm a moderate health-care reformer, I'm also relieved. The ACA represented the country's best shot at keeping a private insurance industry alive and making incremental but meaningful reform. Had the ACA gone down in flames, the health-care system might have suffocated on its own dysfunctions before another reform could be passed in, say, 2030.

If I'm a libertarian, I hardly came away empty-handed. By ruling that Congress can't use its commerce power to command people to do things, the court imposed a new limit on the federal government's power, a constraint which is likely to bear fruit in the future. It also placed a new limit on Congress's power to force states to do things. I've got a lot to work with here.

If I'm a partisan Republican, my feelings are mixed. I lost a short-term political blow to President Obama, but now I'll have the mandate--revealed as the tax it is--to rail against. It's a political weapon with years of effective life. Probably a net plus, on balance.

If I'm a left-wing health reformer, I, too, am ambivalent. The ACA props up the private insurance market, which I wish would hurry up and implode so we can replace it with national health insurance. But I'm glad Obama didn't get creamed.

Legally, all of my hypothetical multiple personalities got a clear message from the Supreme Court, and from its recently wayward chief justice, that the court understands its job in a democratically healthy way. Politically, we got an outcome that makes no radical moves and gives everyone something to be thankful for.

"Great judicial statesmanship"? May well be. In any case, a good day for the court and the country.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Image Source: © Yuri Gripas / Reuters