Washington’s plague spreads
Four governors reflect partisan pressures from D.C.
It wasn’t too long ago that most governors positioned themselves as pragmatic problem-solvers more committed to progress than party. Compared with Congress, that description still applies. But as states are buffeted by polarizing issues like the gay-marriage debate the Supreme Court heard this week, the difference is narrowing.
When I interviewed four sitting governors for a panel discussion at a Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles this week, I heard echoes of the consensual approach that once led governors such as Republican Tommy Thompson and Democrats Jim Hunt and Bill Clinton to advance agendas that blurred partisan lines and launched national reform movements on issues such as education, welfare and children’s health.
But even as the four current governors — Democrats Terry McAuliffe of Virginia and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Republicans Pat McCrory of North Carolina and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska — bantered amiably this week, their conversation also exposed the pressures driving apart red and blue states. The issues on which they agreed, and disagreed, previewed the (limited) opportunities for the parties to cooperate in Washington — and the continued clashes that will rumble through the 2016 presidential election.
The four governors converged around strategies for economic growth. All are pushing to reorient their post-high-school education systems to close a “skills gap” that has left many employers complaining that they can’t find trained workers. “We have jobs available,” McAuliffe insisted. “We have to make sure that our education system is training people to come out with the skills to match those jobs.”
They all touted hybrid programs that more directly link community college (and sometimes high school) students with the workforce needs of local employers. Ricketts, the most ideologically conservative of the four, praised programs “where privatesector companies work with the schools to create a curriculum,” then “pay for [students’] postsecondary education, and create [a] pipeline to hire them directly after that.”
The fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton held her first formal 2016 campaign event at an Iowa community college with just such a program suggests these ideas could appeal broadly.
The governors also urged Washington to finally complete a long-term highway- and transit-infrastructure bill instead of the short-term renewal that seems likely as President Obama and congressional Republicans haggle over funding. McCrory, who recently proposed a big statebond initiative for highways and colleges, told me, “I come from an Eisenhower Republican philosophy [of] investing in the infrastructure of the future.”
The four governors united as well in supporting expanded access to early childhood education. But the two Republicans rejected Obama’s call for a federal program to give states grants to expand pre-kindergarten access, insisting that states should act alone. Both Democrats backed federal intervention, with Hickenlooper proposing a broader principle: Once evidence demonstrates that an idea — like expanded pre-K — produces positive results, the federal government should intervene to spread it more widely across the states.
Washington’s role in healthcare divided the governors. All 21 states that have rejected Medicaid expansion under Obama’s health law (including North Carolina and Nebraska) have Republican governors, GOP-controlled legislatures, or both. Hickenlooper was the only one on the panel who has expanded Medicaid, and since 2013, his state’s uninsured rate has plummeted by fully one-third. Expanding Medicaid, he said, has “been a great part of our economy.... We’ve got more people who are able to go to work; they’re not using … the emergency room for their primary healthcare.”
McAuliffe expressed optimism that, in 2016, he can push Medicaid expansion through a GOP legislature that has so far blocked it. But McCrory said he has concluded he can’t reach agreement with the Obama administration for an expansion that would allow the governor to impose the work and training requirements on recipients that he wants. Ricketts dismissively rejected signing up for “an unknowable long-term liability that could bankrupt our state.”
The president’s impending Environmental Protection Agency regulations to limit carbon emissions from existing power plants split the governors just as sharply.
Governors no longer express these disagreements only in panel discussions. Republican governors are now routinely suing to block Obama initiatives, while Democratic states are mobilizing to defend them. Twenty-six states — all with GOP governors or attorneys general — are suing, for instance, to stop Obama’s executive action legalizing millions of immigrants here illegally; 14 Democratic state attorneys general have intervened to support the administration. The states have clashed in similar alignments over Obama health and environmental initiatives.
Hickenlooper was right when he said governors still find it easier to share ideas across party lines than do officials in Washington. But that healthy tradition is fraying as governors are increasingly conscripted — or enthusiastically enlist — in the ever-widening partisan war radiating from the capital.