Progressivism’s goose and gander problem

The dilemma: Make government work better, no matter who controls it

When you speak to Democrats tempted to support the SPEED Act — for those not familiar, that’s the broadly bipartisan effort to speed the permitting of various projects by shaving down the harsh requirements imposed by the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — you frequently hear one overriding objection.

If progressives are going to support the bill, which would apply to clean and dirty energy projects alike, they are owed, at a minimum, reassurance that President Trump won’t upend the clean projects already under contract. And that’s only logical: If the White House is going to continue to renege on contracts to build offshore wind farms, then it’s likely that the only projects which would benefit from the SPEED Act’s passage are those which emit lots of carbon.

Let’s be frank about the politics here. If Republicans were serious about passing the SPEED Act into law on a bipartisan basis, they would find a way to ensure that Democratic interests were protected. But presumably for fear of White House retribution, congressional Republicans have not agreed to support any such provision, and so the legislation remains in limbo. (My Searchlight colleague Jane Flegal is working to push things along toward a more reasonable compromise. We should all wish her Godspeed.)

There’s more to this stalemate, however. Beneath the internecine negotiations about this singular permitting reform bill hovers the more perennial question about how permitting should work more generally.

Clearly, those of us who care about climate don’t want the current occupant of the White House single-handedly selecting which infrastructure projects move forward, and which are put on ice; his values are antithetical to ours.

But does that objection suggest that presidents of both parties should never be empowered to exercise discretion in this realm? Would we be more comfortable if the projects were selected by an apolitical civil servant? Or a wise old judge? Or a member of Congress who represents the local community? Who, in the end, should decide?

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The goose and the gander

I bring up this dilemma because I’ve come to realize of late that most Democrats have no good answer to these questions. Indeed, most of us haven’t thought about them in the macro sense at all. Instead, the answer we give in any given situation about who should decide is determined by what we see as the ideal outcome.

We happily argue in some circumstances that the “right” process empowering the “right” decision-maker is the executive branch. And later we just as easily argue that, in certain circumstances, the judicial branch should decide. We, like many conservatives, are finicky about process because our druthers are circumstantial — we want the decider in any given circumstance to be someone who will deliver us our preferred outcome. Rarely, if ever, do we consider whether we’d benefit more globally if what was good for the goose was good for the gander.

Returning to the SPEED Act example, we should be honest with ourselves: If Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden were president today, few would have so much heartburn about permitting because we’d presume that their administrations would wield that discretion in order to accelerate the clean energy transition.

Our objection to the procedural elements of the SPEED Act stems from the substantive outcome. Put another way: Progressives are fundamentally process-agnostic so long as we like the outcome. Conservatives, of course, suffer from the same impulse, but toward different ends.

Which brings us back to the question we’ve neglected to answer: How, in general, should choices be made? Who, ultimately, do we think should make big decisions about where, say, a new right-of-way should be cut for a fast train, or whether a new clean-energy transmission line should go through a forest — or perhaps across a residential neighborhood? Place a veil of ignorance between you and the identity of the politician, civil servant, judge, or other arbiter such that you don’t know what they might decide. Who do we progressives believe should be empowered to make the call?

From the Great Depression through the early years of the Cold War, our movement’s overriding impulse was primarily to empower the executive branch. In creating federal bureaucracies like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation, not to mention local authorities like Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, progressives were prone to provide long leashes to the men and women who would lead big bureaucracies to put people to work, to build infrastructure, and to defeat authoritarianism in two separate theaters.

But by the 1960s, following a realization that mayors were bulldozing neighborhoods using federal “slum clearance” dollars, and that state engineers were cutting highways through vibrant urban communities using gas tax revenues, the movement’s perspective flipped.

We began passing laws designed to move power from the executive to the judicial branch. Laws that provided for private rights of action against the government, like NEPA, granted individual citizens opportunities to appeal to the power of judges with the authority to overrule the executive branch. In another vein, more directly relevant to the debate over the Iran War today, the War Powers Act was passed to retrieve authority over various foreign policy decisions from the executive branch and return it to Congress.

But progressives, while edging away from executive authority after Watergate, weren’t single-minded on the issue of process by any means, even then. Just a few years after NEPA passed, President Jimmy Carter entered the White House incensed by the seemingly abusive power the legislative branch wielded over water projects.

Carter suspected that in many cases, members of Congress were directing the Army Corps to build dams that served virtually no purpose beyond providing them an opportunity to have their name emblazoned on a huge public work. So he sought to return power back to the executive. A similar hubbub would erupt years later when Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens inserted an earmark into a bill that would fund a “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. Absent earmarks, the power to choose is returned largely to the executive branch.

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More recently, our ire has turned more explicitly against the courts. As progressives have become increasingly frustrated by the delays and costs of pursuing big projects, a great deal of blame has been placed on the seemingly endless lawsuits the judicial branch entertains from those who raise spurious objections and add endless delays through what appears like spurious litigation.

The shortage of housing in California today is born largely from the fact that ordinary citizens often sue developers on the grounds that a new housing plan violates the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. At one point, pro-life groups filed a lawsuit against construction of a new Planned Parenthood building because, they claimed, the project did not account for the neighborhood-disturbing noise that those very groups would make when they demonstrated outside.

Those pursuing housing abundance today want to return power over what can and cannot be built to the people who own property, such that new proposals are approved “as-of-right” explicitly as the legislature and governor agree. Many of the judicial protections progressives had championed following the Robert Moses era would be rendered moot.

Note that in all of these circumstances, progressives are fighting for undeniably worthy outcomes: the protection of local neighborhoods, more sensible use of the nation’s limited water resources, more expeditious housing production to bring down rents and prices.

But our peripatetic efforts to pursue those worthy ends are invariably process-oriented. We imagine that some arm of government would have delivered the thing which we have prized, but which the incumbent decision-maker — a different arm of government — has gotten in the way of.

That ethos is at the root of a big problem for progressivism writ large. Democrats, whose appeal is directly intertwined with the belief voters have that government is useful and effective, haven’t developed a clear philosophy on who should get to decide when interests conflict.

We’re tempted perpetually to bounce authority to a venue that seems favorable to our position, and to bounce it elsewhere when we believe a different decision-maker would make a better decision. And the merry-go-round leaves government tied in knots. If the solution to every wrong answer is a change of process, then public authority is rendered incompetent.

In most cases, those of us concerned about the climate — and those of us eager to wean the nation off dirty and often imported energy sources — want to see those wind farms built off the nation’s coasts despite President Trump’s objections.

Abundant energy means investing in a wide array of sources, and wind energy is clearly a part of the solution. But the underlying complaint girding progressive complaints about the SPEED Act — namely that, as drafted by the GOP, it does not preclude the president from shutting down construction on contracted wind farms already under construction — pursues the right result without resolving the question of clean and clear process.

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A voice is better than a veto

America needs to adopt a system where, while everyone has a voice, everyone also understands who will ultimately decide. It is one thing if our argument is that presidents should not be able to shut down contracted projects, as Trump wants to do.

But that should require us to forego the tempting prospect of asking the next Democratic president to do the same on the scourge of dirty projects the Trump administration is sure to green-light in the future. What’s good for the goose needs to be good for the gander. If government is going to function, the process needs to be fair.

None of this is to suggest that progressives shouldn’t fight for what they believe in. We do want neighborhoods to be kept whole, for water resources to be used responsibly, for housing to be erected abundantly. But those priorities are often arrayed against one another, and if government is going to be the arbiter it needs to be, we need to embrace some ethos centered around consistency.

We haven’t yet articulated that — and in too many cases it’s clear that progressives haven’t even thought through the specifics. But we need to embrace some sort of results-neutral system capable of weighing costs and benefits against one another. Who, ultimately, should be empowered to choose?