Posted on 03/17/2018 6:01:40 PM PDT by Kaslin
Last week the National League of Cities hosted a conference in Washington, D.C. where a couple thousand mayors and other municipal leaders from around the nation met to address various challenges facing their home towns in 2018. You can debate the usefulness of such confabs all you like, but the concept of shared experiences and an opportunity to develop solutions among local leaders surely has some value. Getting a bit carried away with the concept, however, was Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. So impressed was he with some of the ideas which came out of the meeting that he took to Twitter to advertise his latest editorial… Why aren’t these people running the country?
Why aren’t these people running the country? I talked with some politicians this week–yes, politicians–who spoke a lot of common sense. https://t.co/xMFwJaf90p
— Fred Hiatt (@hiattf) March 17, 2018
Hiatt begins by complaining about trade wars, tax cuts and an infrastructure plan which doesn’t have a clear mechanism in place to pay for it. (And just as a side note, he makes a very good point on that score. We didn’t pay for the tax cuts either.) From there, Fred goes on to provide some examples of the valuable experiences and good questions brought by some of the conference attendees.
Karen Freeman-Wilson (D), the mayor of Gary, Ind. — a.k.a. a public official who actually accomplishes useful things — had recently spent a day with a pothole-repair crew in her city of 80,000. She said the potholes were so prevalent, “you had to ask, why are we even doing this? We need to be paving this street. Well, where’s that money going to come from? And these are main roads! And then the side streets. . . . And then someone comes into my office and says, ‘When are you going to repave my alley?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
Not long before, Mark Stodola, the Democratic mayor of Little Rock and this year’s president of the National League of Cities, took part in a program to award modest road-building grants to small towns around the state.
“It was shocking the desperation you saw in these applications,” Stodola said. Officials worried about school buses getting through in winter, farmers getting their product to market, first responders getting to families in emergencies.
Stodola said more than 1,300 council members were in town to remind Congress about rusting pipes in Flint, Mich., rising tides in Houston, aging infrastructure everywhere.
Obviously, there’s no real mystery in how Hiatt just so happens to quote a number of mayors and other municipal officials who all, purely by coincidence, happened to be Democrats. These were the ones willing to bash conservative principles and the GOP in general when they weren’t going after President Trump specifically. But both the conference and Hiatt’s column do offer us the opportunity to answer his question and reflect on some of the foundational principles of good government.
To get the $64,000 question out of the way up front, why aren’t these people running the country? To borrow a phrase from those pleasant ladies from the E-surance commercial, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. But you already knew that. Still, at the same time, these actually are the people who run the country in a very important way (though they don’t get to run nearly enough of it). All of this comes down to a well-worn conservative principle which most of the speakers Hiatt highlighted are likely loathe to admit:
The best place to bestow governmental power is that the level closest to the people.
This is true for a number of reasons, not least of which is that accountability is much easier to manage at the municipal level. If a nationally elected figure begins causing trouble you’ve got to herd a vast, diverse group of cats to build any sort of consensus in terms of holding them responsible. By contrast, if someone shows up at a city council meeting with a video of one of the council members stealing money from the parking meters you can give them the boot pretty quickly.
More importantly, they are dealing with problems which are frequently unique to their locale. Some of the mayors have rusty pipes. Others don’t, and not all of the pipes around the nation are rusting for the same reasons. Northern mayors have a lot more problems with potholes than their southern counterparts. Did you know that the requirements for laying blacktop in Alabama are vastly different than how you need to do it in Minnesota? So each of them has challenges to deal with and experiences and solutions they can share. But not all of the solutions will work everywhere. That’s why local government is so crucial and good local leaders are a treasure.
The elected creatures who inhabit the Beltway are a different breed. They are only rarely able to loyally represent the specific interests of the folks back home. They’re too busy worrying about sticking with the party’s ideological vision for the country. They have to raise money for their next election. They need to make sure they don’t incur the wrath of the ideological extremes in the party base. Frankly, it’s a miracle when they get anything productive done at all.
And do you know what would happen if you took all those mayors and municipal legislators and sent them to Washington to run the entire country? They’d turn into exactly the same sort of creatures and all those wonderful ideas and that boundless energy would disappear. Because that’s just how Washington works. You want to solve a problem for the nation, Fred? Try tackling that one because I don’t have a clue what to do about it.
Neither should high school students nor billionaires. It is a job delegated by “We The People”
In a little over 2 weeks, the next FReepathon will begin.
We need to finish this one first.
Come on FReepers, let’s do this!!!
Every city represented by these political hack imbeciles are sh*tholes and mostly Democrat run. They can pretty them up as much as they want (always by Federal money) and hide the ghettos but they will always be the example of political graft, government and societal failure. These people are delusional.
I would gladly pay $9.99/month.
Yes, if just 3,000 people did that, we could make it work!
Or get a bunch of advertisers to pay for it. Nobody pays attention to the ads anyway.
Wait, the same mayors that put their cities a combined trillion dollars plus in unfunded pension liabilities?
The ones most likely to receive bribes, kickbacks and educated looks the other way at crime, malfeasance and corruption?
You mean those mayors?
No thank you.
let’s make a deal with sanctuary cities;
No Federal Agents enforcing Federal Law in your cities
in exchange
No Federal Bailout when you go bankrupt
Anyone ever wondered what the reaction would be if some random mayors started declaring sanctuary cities for all firearms?
I know 2nd amendment and all but just wondering if the shoe were on the other foot I can’t imagine the level of outrage.
One word.
Flint.
The various municipal lobbies are hoping for an Article V convention for the purpose of changing our Bill of Rights and doing just that: running our country with even more discretion on their part. They have quite a bit of influence over our state assemblies.
“I would gladly pay $9.99/month. “
So would I——I’d even spring for $10.00 a month.
.
Says the #NeverTrump-er
You mean folks like
Kwame Kilpatrick, Bill Campbell, Tony Mack, or the rest of the bunch...
http://www.citymayors.com/politics/us-corrupt-mayors.html
Add, that anyone that voted for said mayor and supports the sanctuary policies, isn’t allowed to move out of the city. None of us wants liberal, hipster, d-bags, with the money to move when things get bad, like a swarm of locusts and destroy the next place. Let them live with the consequences of their decisions and wallow in the misery.
Yea lets have rat leaders of home grown shi# holes dictate how to run the country, we already have high school students that are still in diapers doing this with the rats help
Pittsburgh elected this turd mayor Peduto who is so far left that he would feel at home in Moscow. Pittsburgh is a mess more than ever. Roads don’t get plowed in the winter, taxes are high and its more inept at everything else. But at least we have bike lanes everywhere.
I did that, by setting up an autopay on my credit card. :)
Spending other people's money is not leadership. Spending money you don't have is not leadership.
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