Still Broken?

This week, the winter 2010 class of John Glenn Fellows is reading Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein's The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. It's a fine book, in part because it is the product of genuine collaboration between two seasoned Congress watchers who care very much about the institution, and American government.

My main criticism of the book has always been that Mann and Ornstein underestimate the corrupting influence of money, which has always been present, of course, but which looms larger now than ever before. Perhaps I should ask the Fellows to read Robert Kaiser's So Damn Much Money (see my post of January 4, 2010, adorned by a wonderful picture of Congressman Murtha), along with The Broken Branch.

Mann and Ornstein themselves continue to evolve. In the Outlook section of today's Washington Post, Ornstein has a piece called "A Very Productive Congress, Despite What the Approval Ratings Say." It turns out, Ornstein argues, that the 111th Congress has been one of the most productive in history. And he makes a pretty good case. So, is Congress still broken? That will be my query for this Wednesday's seminar session.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe on PBS: Picking Nits

First of all, many thanks to Lydia Hess for posting a link to the PBS show as a comment to my earlier post on this subject. Here it is again: http://video.pbs.org/video/1386799719/

The video is informative and well worth a look. Still, one can always pick nits.

The host, Paul Goldberger, should have made it clear that the Baltimore Basilica (see image, top left), America's first Roman Catholic cathedral, was recently in a dreadful state of disrepair and nearly lost. That it shows up so beautifully in the PBS documentary is owing to a magnificent preservation project that concluded in 2006.

I was surprised, also, that Goldberger never mentions that Latrobe's son, also named Benjamin Henry, was one of the great American civil engineers of the mid nineteenth century. Latrobe II was chief engineer for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and has left us some structures that are both structually and aesthetically impressive, including the ThomasViaduct (see image above, at right). By all accounts, Latrobe fils was a splendid fellow; the city of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was named for him.

Those looking for another dose of Latrobe Senior should consider visiting Decatur House on Lafayette Square (across from the White House).

Benjamin Latrobe on PBS

Now that we've had a close-up look at Benjamin Latrobe's Capitol dome (the original, lower one), you might be interested in a PBS special on "America's first architect." It airs at 10:00 p.m., Monday, January 18.

A Book Full of Numbers

Robert J. Samuelson is an op-ed columnist who often has something provocative to say about current events. His column in yesterday’s Post was about the Statistical Abstract of the United States, an annual publication of the Census Bureau. I found it especially stimulating given that we have had our noses buried in Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis this week.

Bardach says that in defining the problem (step one of The Eightfold Path) one should think in terms of deficit and excess and “quantify if possible.” He also suggests that one’s thesis should consist of hypothesized relationships between two or more variables. Bardach’s Appendix A, for example, is about sentencing laws and rates of cocaine consumption (and drug-related crime).

Samuelson’s piece, meanwhile, could be the source of a number of testable hypotheses. For example, he reports (again, based on the Statistical Abstract of the United States) that the U.S. seems to enjoy the world’s lowest food prices, but to suffer from the highest rates of obesity. Just a coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

Samuelson also finds evidence in the Statistical Abstract that over the past four decades student-teacher ratios have declined dramatically, but that (contrary to everything that we’ve been told by the teachers’ unions) there has been no discernable improvement in standardized test results.

Finally, Samuelson notes that crime rates have declined since the early 1990s, and he speculates that that might be due to “better policing techniques” and/or “tougher sentencing” patterns, from which we might infer that Samuelson has not read Bardach’s Appendix A.

Anyway, I thought this might be helpful to the Glenn Fellows as they ponder the logic of the Research Proposal Worksheet.

A Research Proposal on Capital Punishment

Glenn Fellows in the Winter 2010 class are now beginning to think about the policy papers that they will be submitting at the end of the quarter. Accordingly, they are reading Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Policy Solving, which argues that in the process of defining one's research problem (step one) it is often helpful “to think in terms of deficit and excess” (pp. 1-2). It is also a good idea to steer clear of grand moral pronouncements.

I have provided the fellows with a one-page worksheet that is designed to walk them through the problem-defining process. Here is a sample of how it might work:

On the topic of capital punishment, the following question arises: Setting aside for the moment important questions about the morality and the constitutionality of the death penalty, does it represent a practical approach to the punishment of persons who have committed heinous crimes?

This question has several plausible answers. For example, some scholars have claimed that the prospect of lifetime incarceration may be every bit as effective as the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime (which would argue for abolition of the death penalty).

It is also possible to argue that, quite apart from the issue of deterrence, the costs associated with lifetime incarceration impose an unreasonably heavy burden on American taxpayers (arguing in favor of the death penalty).

My own answer to the question is as follows: There is reason to think that capital punishment, whatever its merits, may not be as cost-effective (i.e., practical) as one might think.

My thesis is supported by the following piece of evidence: A recent policy study has demonstrated that cases in which prosecutors seek the death penalty are far more expensive (about $3 million, on average) to litigate (including both prison and adjudication costs) than death-penalty-eligible cases in which the death penalty is not, for whatever reason, sought by prosecutors (about $1.1 million, on average). Reference: John Roman, et al, “The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland” (Washington: Justice Policy Center, Urban Institute, 2008). Here's a link: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/CostsDPMaryland.pdf

My thesis is significant because it modifies and/or adds to current thinking on this topic in the following way: If it can be shown that prosecution and incarceration costs associated with capital punishment are significantly higher than those associated with lifetime incarceration, then capital punishment should never be adopted or reinstated with a view to reducing the burden on American taxpayers (though of course the death penalty might still be justifiable on other grounds).

So Damn Much Money: A Book Review

The sordid story of Congressional sausage making is well told in Robert G. Kaiser’s So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Kaiser makes a persuasive case that American universities—not Wall Street or the Teamsters or the AARP—are responsible for one of Washington’s nastiest and most expensive habits: earmarking.

As technical instruments for the appropriation of public monies, earmarks haven’t been around nearly as long as one might suppose. The protagonist in Kaiser’s history is a lobbyist named Gerald Cassidy, one of whose clients, Tufts University, wanted to build a nutrition center on its campus in Medford, Massachusetts—which, as luck would have it, was in the district of Tip O’Neill, who was soon to be elected Speaker of the House. O’Neill enlisted the support of Rep. Jamie Whitten, long-time power broker on the House Agriculture Committee. And voilà. In fiscal year 1978, as Kaiser tells the story, “Congress appropriated $20 million to build the nutrition center, and an additional $7 million to fund its initial operations. Though attached to Tufts, it would be formally part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which would pay its operating expenses for years to come.”[i]

As soon as they saw what Cassidy and Tufts president Jean Mayer had done, other universities were quick to get into the game. Kaiser’s story is fascinating because it involves so many academics—and priests, in the case of Georgetown and other Roman Catholic universities—along with a few certified scoundrels, including Jack Abramoff, and some of the most prominent members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. The bucks, let it be said, are decidedly big; the last photo in the book’s gallery is an aerial shot of Gerry Cassidy’s $8 million estate on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the many virtues of this book is that Kaiser recognizes that there is a case to made on behalf of earmarks. To begin with, the distinction between “pork” and the legislator’s responsibility to “bring home the bacon” is largely one of perspective; it’s legitimate bacon when it’s on my plate, it’s pork when it’s on yours.

That said, I fear that Kaiser is right to suggest that while legislators sometimes can be corrupted by crooked lobbyists, it is as often the case that the vicious circle begins with Members of Congress who feel they must be increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of campaign contributions. So Damn Much Money is an informative account of Congressional sausage making, and one that suggests that Congress remains, in the words of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “the broken branch.” It’s not a pretty picture.



[i] Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 71