John Nichols | The Nation

Tony Evers. (Flickr/WisPolitics.com)

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced that he would use his upcoming budget to expand private-school voucher programs, even some Republican legislators objected.

But the loudest objection to Walker’s approach, and to the broader national push to shift taxpayer dollars away from public education and toward private experiments, came from Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers. Evers, an educator who in 2009 was elected to lead the state's Department of Public Instruction, appeared before the legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee and in communities across Wisconsin to state that opposition. “This has to stop,” he said. “The state cannot continue to play favorites. We can and must meet our constitutional obligation to invest in all of our kids.”

Complaining that the previous Walker budget had cut $1.8 billion from public schools, Evers argued that it was wrong for the governor to use his 2013-15 state budget plan to essentially freeze public school funding while hiking spending for private voucher school students by as much as $1,400 each.

Staking out so clear a position in opposition to the governor’s agenda—not just on vouchers but on a host of education policy issues—was risky. Evers was up for reelection and he faced a determined challenge from Republican state Representative Don Pridemore, a steady supporter of Walker’s legislative agenda. The governor did not make an endorsement in the nonpartisan race and that miffed Pridemore, one of the most conservative members of the legislature. But the challenger's campaign was cheered on by the Republican Assembly Speaker, conservative radio hosts and activists.

A well-regarded and easy-going figure, Evers could easily have mounted a cautious campaign for the statewide post.

Instead, he campaigned across the state prior to Wisconsin’s April 2 statewide election with a message that Walker’s voucher scheme posed a threat to public education.

“This money isn’t coming from Madison. This money is coming directly from your school districts,” Evers told teachers and parents. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what the priority is here,” Evers said. “It’s not public schools. It’s voucher schools. It’s privatization, and don’t let anybody tell you differently.”

With a challenger campaigning as a proponent of vouchers—and charging that Evers was too closely aligned with educators and their unions, which backed the superintendent’s reelection—the race offered Wisconsinites what the Associated Press referred to as a “stark choice.”

Voters responded by giving Evers a 61-39 victory statewide.

“Today’s election offered voters a crystal clear choice between two very different philosophies about education,” the superintendent declared on election night. “Voters spoke loudly and clearly, affirming their commitment to Wisconsin’s strong public schools and calling for a much-needed reinvestment to support the over 870,000 public school kids in our state.”

Lisa Subeck, the executive director of the progressive grassroots group United Wisconsin argued that the election results should cause the governor to rethink.

“Evers ran on a pro-public education platform, and his victory sends a clear message that the voters of Wisconsin reject Governor Walker’s push to sink more public money into unaccountable private vouchers schools,” she said. “With the resounding defeat of pro-voucher candidate and GOP state representative Don Pridemore, the message to Scott Walker is clear. Walker should end his ideological march to expand his private school voucher program and restore funding to Wisconsin’s public schools.”

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The governor may not waver. His positions are popular with conservative advocates at the national level, and it is no secret that he’s pondering a 2016 presidential run. But Republicans legislators, especially in the state Senate, have already raised concerns. Indeed, Senate President Mike Ellis says that a number of Republicans find the governor’s proposal “unacceptable.” Ellis says Walker’s proposal will be "drastically changed" during the budget debate.

How drastically remains to be seen. But Republican legislators who were disinclined to go along with Walker on the voucher issue—and the broader education-funding debate—will take comfort from the fact that, in a “stark choice” election, voters gave overwhelming support to the candidate who was outspoken in his defense of public education.

The antidote for education shock therapy? Read Rick Perlstein's take.

Senator Sherrod Brown. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has for years battled to break up “too-big-to-fail” banks, arguing, “American taxpayers don’t want us to wait until another crisis develops. They want us to ensure that Wall Street megabanks will never again monopolize our nation’s wealth or gamble away the American Dream.”

Now, as the US Senate looks to reshuffle its most powerful posts following the 2014 election, Brown is a serious contender to take over as chair of the Senate Banking Committee.

If Democrats retain control of the chamber, a senator who has proudly tangled with Wall Street and the nation’s biggest banks might actually be given the authority to investigate and regulate what the populists and progressives of a century ago referred to as “the money power.”

That’s a very big deal, as Brown is not merely an outspoken critic of oversized banks. The Ohio Democrat has built bipartisan support for break-up-the-banks legislation, and he has a populist eye for issues that highlight the struggle to end the excesses of Wall Street and the banks. Just last week, he secured a unanimous Senate vote for a resolution to end federal subsidies for the biggest banks.

So how could Brown, who is just starting his second term, become chairman of the powerful Banking Committee?

The current chair, South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson, will retire after the 2014 election. That puts Senator Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, in line to chair the committee; but Reed is also in line to chair the powerful Armed Services Committee, and it is widely believed he prefers that position.

Next in line is New York’s Chuck Schumer. But Schumer hopes to eventually replace Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada. And that makes his decision complicated.

Because Schumer is broadly seen as being close to Wall Street, the big bankers would love to see the New Yorker take the committee chairmanship. And he may well do so—if only to block Brown. But Schumer is savvy enough to know that doing so could damage his long-term prospects as a contender for a leadership post. Why? Because the Senate’s burgeoning progressive caucus—which will be a factor in any leadership race—wants to get tougher with the banks. And because a stint as Banking Committee chair, especially if it is characterized by compromises with the industry’s biggest players, could tarnish Schumer’s image and make him a less attractive leadership prospect.

New Jersey‘s Bob Menendez, the third Democratic senator in line for the Banking Committee chairmanship, has given every indication that he is more interested in remaining chair of the Foreign Relations Committee—a post he took up when former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry became Secretary of State.

That brings us to Brown.

Already, media outlets that cater to the financial and political elites are abuzz regarding the prospect that a populist with a proven track record when it comes to building bipartisan coalitions for reform might suddenly be in a position to get tough on the big banks. The headlines tell the story:

“Big banks’ nightmare: Chairman Sherrod Brown”
“Watch Out Wall Street, Sherrod’s Coming”
“Banking gavel could fall to Wall Street critic”

To be clear, Brown is not a critic of all banks. Just the behemoths that could, were they to stumble, crash the US economy. Brown talks up community banks and credit unions that play by the rules and serve consumers. Indeed, he wants to make sure that the federal government respects small banks, rather than simply bowing before the big guys.

While many other Democrats have been willing to compromise on the “too-big-to-fail” issue, Brown has been steadfast. When the Senate was debating what would eventually become the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, Brown broke with his fellow Democrats and sought to enact the Safe, Accountable, Fair & Efficient (SAFE) Banking Act. That measure would have capped the size of banks so that none could control so large a percentage of the economy that the threat of its failure might demand a new bailout.

Brown was blocked then, but he’s back with a new version of the bill, and with a Republican co-sponsor, Louisiana Senator David Vitter.

Arguing for that bill, Brown asked, “How many more scandals will it take before we acknowledge that we can’t rely on regulators to prevent subprime lending, dangerous derivatives, risky proprietary trading, and even fraud and manipulation?”

And Brown answered: “We simply cannot wait any longer for regulators to act. These institutions are too big to manage, they are too big to regulate, and they are surely still too big to fail.”

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It’s been a long time since the Senate Banking Committee was chaired by a progressive populist who is willing to take on not just “too-big-to-fail” banks but to demand that the banking industry serve communities and treat consumers fairly. And it’s been even longer since a populist chairman had an ally on the committee like newly-elected Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a key ally of Brown’s.

History does record, however, that big things happen when the oversight responsibility is handed to a senator who worries more about Maine Street than Wall Street.

When Democrats gained control of the Senate in 1933, Florida Senator Duncan Upshaw Fletcher took the chairmanship of what was then the Banking and Currency Committee. Charged with identifying the guilty men whose greed caused the 1929 Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression that followed, Fletcher worked with a crack New York prosecutor, Ferdinand Pecora, to call the bankers and the speculators to account. Pecora and his team were so aggressive, and so effective, that they even got J.P. Morgan Jr., to acknowledge that he had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932—an admission that provoked a national outcry and demand for reform.

The reforms came quickly. The Banking Committee’s high-profile inquiry cleared the way for the enactment of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Securities and Exchange Commission was established in 1935 to enforce those new laws, along with a host of other measures that end myriad abuses.

The combination of Fletcher Duncan and Ferdinand Pecora put the people back in charge in the 1930s, and provided generations of Americans with protection against the threat posed by unregulated and under-regulated banks and brokers. The combination of Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren could do the same in the twenty-first century.

That prospect scares behemoth bankers.

But it should excite Americans who recognize that the nation’s economy—and its democracy—will never be secure for so long as “too-big-to-fail” banks are allowed to call the shots.

What happens when you rip a hole in the safety net? Read Bryce Covert’s analysis.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

When the voters of Detroit were given the opportunity to decide whether they wanted Rick Snyder to have a role in running their city, it did not go well.

Snyder, as the Republican nominee for governor in 2010, finished with just 5 percent of the vote.

As in: He lost the city by a 20-1 margin.

Snyder made up for the deficit statewide and was elected in a “Republican wave” moment. But there is no evidence that the governor or his policies have risen in popularity since then.

So, for all the carefully prepared marketing that has surrounded Snyder’s imposition of an appointed “emergency manager” to run the city, for all the pronouncements about how “Detroit Can’t Wait” for state intervention, for all the governor’s talk of his suspending of imposition of an unelected boss as “an opportunity to work together, to bring people together as Detroit, Michigan,” the important thing to remember is that Detroit did not choose to surrender local democracy.

Detroit certainly did not choose to hand control over to the appointee of a Republican governor whose 2010 vote wasn’t even competitive.

That’s not conjecture. The opposition to Snyder’s agenda has been registered and recorded.

The question of whether to eliminate Michigan’s state’s emergency manager law was on the ballot last November. Detroit voted overwhelmingly to strike the law from the statute books; 82 percent of Detroit voters, casting ballots in a high-turnout presidential election, voted against letting the governor effectively replace elected mayors and city council members with a hand-picked appointee. The rest of Michigan sided with Detroit on that issue, and the law was eliminated. But Snyder and a lame-duck legislature disregarded the will of the people and passed the new law that, on Monday, was used by Snyder to impose his emergency manager on the city.

On the same ballot last November was a referendum on whether to protect collective bargaining rights so that emergency managers and Republican governors could not bust unions in their push for austerity and privatization. Detroit voted 83 percent to 17 percent in favor of preserving unions.

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So Snyder has no credibility when he suggests there is even minimal enthusiasm for his imposition of outside control on Detroit—or other majority-minority cities and school districts across the state—as part of a push to undermine union contracts and cut services. Nor, it should be noted, does he have a credible claim of economic necessity: The governor has held up hundreds of millions of dollars in promised state aid funding for Detroit, funding that could help to stabilize the finances of a city that has been battered not by public employees but by the wave of deindustrialization that has shuttered auto plants, parts suppliers and machine shops across the city.

It’s important to expose and challenge the austerity lie.

But it’s even more important to expose and challenge the assault on democracy in Detroit and Michigan—and, it should be noted, numerous other states. When a city’s voters reject a Republican governor and his agenda, and that governor is still able to shove aside local elected officials and impose his personal appointee to make all the calls regarding how the city is run, democracy is denied. And that denial attacks the most fundamental premises of the American experiment.

As Aura Bogado writes, communities of color across the country already live under a certain kind of receivership—the willful hands of the police.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus speak against proposed tax cuts, December 10, 2010. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

When it comes to budgets, debts and deficits and, most importantly, the future of the US economy, there are two distinct visions competing in Washington.

Both cost a lot of money.

But they seek to steer the United States in radically different directions.

One vision, that of House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, spends our federal largesse on tax breaks for the rich and schemes to divert Medicare funds into the accounts of private insurers. It’s classic crony capitalism. But that’s not the worst of it. Because Ryan’s plan comes wrapped in an austerity model for squeezing government spending and investment, it threatens to stall an economy that is only beginning to grow at a rate sufficient to create needed jobs.

On Thursday, the House voted 221-207 for the Ryan budget. The Republican majority was reasonably solidified in support of the proposal, although ten sincere fiscal conservatives opposed a measure that focuses far more of satisfying the demands of Wall Street donors than actual deficit reduction.

Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the Ryan budget. That can and should be read as a rejection of the ugliest face of austerity. But it is not the case that congressional Democrats are united when it comes to presenting an alternative to Ryanism. And that’s a problem because voters don’t just want Congress to reject austerity; polling data makes it clear that they want an alternative that is focused on job creation.

The best alternatives to the Ryan budget have been presented by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The two groups, which have a significant overlap in their membership, saw their proposals rejected by the House on Wednesday. Ryan’s Republican colleagues opposed both plans, as did dozens of cautious Democrats who have yet to recognize the importance of challenging the lie of austerity with a no-holds-barred growth agenda.

The political reality, of course, is that this week’s House votes settle nothing with regard to the budget priorities that will ultimately frame the nation’s future. “Once again, Republicans in the House have passed a budget that the American people do not support, and has no real chance of becoming law,” explained Congressman Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who serves on the Budget Committee. “This is a budget whose math is bogus, but whose consequences are real and serious for our middle class families in Wisconsin. From destroying jobs, to raising taxes on the middle class, to turning Medicare into a voucher system, it makes the wrong decisions and reflects the wrong priorities… But the biggest problem with the GOP budget is that it fails to tackle the greatest threat to our long-term deficit—our need to grow our economy and create jobs. With 12 million Americans still unemployed, and millions more who are underemployed, the best budget we can put forth is one that fosters job growth.”

It will be in the wrangling between the House and Senate, and the broader national debate, that the fiscal and economic priorities of the nation will finally be shaped.

And it is important to recognize that, in that broader national debate, Ryan and the House majority have already lost.

The American people have no taste for austerity.

They want a growth agenda. The new Gallup Poll finds that 72 percent of Americans support spending federal money on a program to “put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” Seventy-two percent of Americans also favor “a federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program that would create more than one million new jobs.”

Those positions are antithetical to everything Ryan is proposing.

That’s a growth agenda that is the opposite of austerity.

It is a growth agenda that mirrors what the Congressional Progressive Caucus has proposed with its “Back to Work” budget.

The CPC budget plan balances the budget far more efficiently and effectively than does Ryan’s—as it eschews the pay-to-play giveaways to campaign donors in the insurance, pharmaceutical and financial-services industries—and stimulates job creation. That’s because the CPC proposal rejects austerity in favor of growth. The focus on growth is essential to the CPC plan, which is wholly distinct from other Democratic plans that seek to strike an often incoherent balance between smart investments and Ryan’s austerity.

“Americans face a choice,” CPC co-chairs Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, and Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, say of the difference between plans that seeks deep cuts in necessary programs and their proposal to invest in the creation of almost 7 million jobs while reducing the deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next 10 years. “We can either cut Medicare benefits to pay for more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or we can close outdated tax loopholes and invest in jobs. We choose investment.”

Actually, as the Gallup survey confirms, Americans have made their choice.

Unfortunately, the House majority remains, as the recent Republican National Committee “autopsy report” on why the GOP fared so badly in 2012 notes, badly “out of touch” with the great mass of Americans.

On Wednesday, 84 House members, all of them Democrats, backed the “Back to Work” budget. Opposing it were 225 Republicans and 102 compromise-prone Democrats. The vote came on a day when the chamber also rejected the commendable Congressional Black Caucus budget by a similarly wide margin and the less-inspired Senate Democratic budget plan on a narrower split.

The good news is that this week’s House votes represent political theater, rather than political reality.

The real fights lay ahead. And Democrats would be wise to recognize this fact.

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Ryan certainly does.

Despite the absolute certainty that his plan will not be adopted, the House Budget Committee chairman will keep promoting his austerity agenda, with its crony capitalist payouts to political benefactors. And a number of Republicans in the House and Senate will continue to suggest that it is the only way.

Democrats do the debate, and the nation, a disservice if they fail to steadily and aggressively point out not just that Ryan is wrong but that there is, in the wise assessment of Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, “a better way.”

Neither the “pro-growth, pro-people, pro-America” Congressional Black Caucus budget—with its smart focus on investments to save the jobs of teachers and first responders—nor the Congressional Progressive Caucus “Back to Work” budget will, unfortunately, be adopted in its entirety. But these plans outline agendas that are dramatically sounder—and that have dramatically more popular appeal—than the proposal Ryan will continue to advance. As such, the ideals and the sound fiscal and programmatic approaches outlined by the CBC and the CPC ought not be abandoned by progressives simply because the better plans did not win an endorsement from the Republican-controlled House.

As the Senate wrangles with budget issues, it is essential that the core commitments of the CPC plan be kept on the table. These, as the CPC co-chairs explain, include moves to repeal “the arbitrary sequester and the Budget Control Act spending caps that are damaging the economy,” reduce unemployment to near 5 percent in three years with “a jobs plan that includes repairing our nation’s roads and bridges and putting teachers, cops and firefighters back to work” and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid. They’d find the money “by closing tax loopholes and making sure the wealthy pay their fair share.”

The final budget that comes out of Congress will be a compromise. There’s no doubt about that.

But congressional Democrats should not come at the process from a place of compromise. House Republicans will go to their corner, backing the austerity agenda outlined in the Ryan budget.

Senate and House Democrats will have many opportunities in coming weeks and months to propose clear alternatives. They will regularly revisit budget issues in debates about various plans, in conference committee negotiations, in new votes.

The place of beginning for the Democrats—and, frankly, for responsible Republicans—ought to be with an absolute rejection of austerity and an embrace of growth based on investment in job creation.

The American people want a “Back to Work” budget. The polling is clear and unequivocal in this regard. Gallup found that 92 percent of Democrats back federal spending to create infrastructure jobs, but so, too, do 71 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans. Federal spending to create one million new jobs has the support of 93 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Republicans.

But polling data does not provide the only confirmation of where the American people are at.

There’s a signal to be read, as well, from the 2012 election results that gave President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden a 51-47 win over Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, along with a popular victory of almost 5 million votes; that gave Democrats fifty-five Senate seats; and that, despite redistricting, saw 1.4 million more Americans vote Democratic than Republican in competitive House races.

“This is what the country voted for in November,” CPC co-chairs Grijalva and Ellison say of the “Back to Work” budget. “It’s time we side with America’s middle class and working families instead of leaving them to go it alone. We believe in the American people and a government that works for everyone, and that’s what this budget delivers.”

That’s a message Democrats need to take to heart if they are going to get in touch with the American people and provide the needed alternative to the crude mix of crony capitalism and austerity that Paul Ryan is peddling.

As Jamie Raskin writes, what the economy really needs is a “Chamber of Progress.”