The Price of Citizenship

Naturalization involves paperwork, which in turn involves fees. Some of them are going up. The New York Times reports:

Under the proposal, the fee to apply for a green card, the document for legal permanent residents, would increase to $985 from $930. The application for employment authorization would increase to $380 from $340. A separate fee for fingerprints and other biometrics with many applications would increase to $85 from $80.

Among several new fees, officials said, will be a $6,230 charge for foreigners proposing to invest $500,000 or more in businesses to create jobs in the United States.

The fee for naturalization would remain at $595. That fee was raised in July 2007 by 69 percent and the immigration agency was overwhelmed by applications from immigrants rushing to file ahead of that increase. Since then, naturalization applications have dropped steeply and advocates blamed the higher fee for discouraging eligible immigrants from becoming citizens

.

Campaign Coverage

At Politics Daily, Walter Shapiro laments the decline of statewide campaign coverage. Last Saturday afternoon, he covered South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley and noticed the absence of the South Carolina press corps.

What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul's decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.

Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina's largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found that newsroom staffs across the country have declined by 25 percent since 2001.

As we discuss in our chapter on the mass media, blogs are ill-equipped to fill the gap, since much of their information actually comes from the mainstream media.

Midterm: Presidential and Congressional Perspectives

In The New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai recently had an analysis of the 2010 midterm elections. This excerpt discusses Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama campaign organization that became part of the Democratic National Committee, as well as Obama manager David Plouffe, who is serving as an outside political adviser:

This time, however, O.F.A. volunteers won’t be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for a young, electric, racially transcendent presidential candidate. Instead, in a lot of districts, they’ll be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for some aging member of Congress who has been on the ballot 10 times already, which is a considerably harder sell. “Let’s be clear — these are not Democratic voters,” Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. “They’re Obama voters.” The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party’s candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it’s only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven’t generally been reliable Democrats.

This is not what members of Congress or their campaign managers are trained to do, and it has created something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus.

House Expenses

Our Congress chapter explains that the institution is a complex organization with many employees and offices. As the Sunlight Foundation reports, running the House is expensive:

In the final month of fiscal year 2009, House committees and offices went on a shopping spree, spending more than $60 million left in their budgets before it disappeared. More than $12 million went towards purchasing computer hardware, which could include new laptops and desktops.

According to a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group analysis of six months of congressional spending data released by the House Clerk's Office, House members and various committee offices spent more than $673 million in the last half of 2009 on salaries for staff, travel and outside vendors, who help with everything from tracking constituent information to providing cell phone service and bottled water.

Sunlight's database on House expenditures is here.

National v. Local Considerations in House Elections

A major theme of our book is that politics is not just about self-interest. A new Gallup survey is consistent with that theme:

By 55% to 39%, more registered voters say a candidate's stand on national issues -- rather than his or her ability to help people at the district level -- is what matters more to them in voting for Congress. The percentage naming issues as the more important factor is the highest recorded on this measure in the nearly two-decade-long Gallup trend, although similar to that seen at points in the last two midterm election years.

...

The maxim that "all politics is local" -- most famously advanced by the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- may have once been an accurate characterization of the relationship that congressional candidates had with their constituents. In that vein, as recently as 1994, significantly more registered voters said that delivering for their district was more important to the way they viewed congressional candidates than were national issue stances. However, since 1994 -- perhaps because of the nationalization of that election with the Republicans' Contract With America -- Americans' voting priorities have flipped.

In a year when voters rank the federal budget deficit as high as terrorism as a top concern, the implications are clear. Twenty years ago, candidates for Congress might have ingratiated themselves with voters by bulleting all of the federal spending projects they either had delivered to the district, or would support if elected. Today, such messages may be more likely to spark constituents' concerns about the effect the spending involved could have on the national debt.

Wydra on the Tea Party and the Constitution

Elizabeth Wydra (CMC `98) writes at the Huffington Post about the tea party movement and the Constitution:

The Tea Party's sights appear to be set on constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War. Rand Paul, recent winner of Kentucky's Republican senatorial primary, and Rep. Duncan Hunter of San Diego have called for repeal of the 14^th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship at birth for all children born in the United States--not to mention Paul's much-publicized criticism of the Civil Rights Act, legislation passed pursuant to the power given to Congress by the 14^th Amendment to enforce its guarantees of equal protection, due process of law, and the rights of citizenship. Sharron Angle, the Tea Party-endorsed candidate who appears poised to win today's Republican senatorial race in Nevada, has called for repeal of the 16^th Amendment, which allows for a federal progressive income tax. And many Tea Party activists are pushing for repeal of the 17^th Amendment, which shifted the selection of U.S. Senators from state legislatures to the state's voters.

To repeal these hard-won parts of our Constitution would be pure folly. The constitutional changes made in the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery wrote into the Constitution the promises of equality made in the Declaration of Independence, and gave the federal government the power to ensure that these promises were kept.

Federalism and Film

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Texans are bombarding the governor's office with calls and letters to try to stop tax dollars from subsidizing a satirical film about a vengeful illegal immigrant.

The coming film, a bloody action movie with a star-studded cast titled "Machete," could be eligible for more than $1.5 million of taxpayer subsidies under a program designed to encourage directors to shoot in Texas.

The state Film Commission may deny subsidies to any production that includes "inappropriate content or content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion." But the commission—eager to woo as many movie, advertising and video-game shoots as possible—has never exercised that clause. "You have to understand that we want to create jobs," said Bob Hudgins, the commission's director. "That is our focus."

The story points to a contemporary issue of federalism. States like to attract film production because it generates jobs and business. They compete with one another to offer support and benefits to film companies. Here is a list of state film commissions. Here is a report from the National Governors Assocation.