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Although in the U.S. marijuana remains illegal under federal law, a number of states have legalized marijuana in some fashion. Sam Kamin, author of “The Battle of the Bulge: The Surprising Last Stand Against State Marijuana Legalization,” agreed to answer several questions from John Dinan, editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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The national headlines following the 2014 Midterm elections trumpeted the Republican success in seizing the majority in the US Senate and expanding its strength in the US House to record numbers since 1929. These wins were striking but hardly surprising given the tsunami of polls. The big news that continues to elude commentators are the Republican wins in gubernatorial elections – wins that may well have more impact on everyday lives than the Washington battle that pits a Republican Congress against President Barack Obama’s veto pen. Republicans not only pulled out wins in hotly contested battles in Florida, Kansas, Maine, and Wisconsin, but they also invaded Democratic strongholds by prevailing in Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

Will the GOP gubernatorial wins sweep in a revolution that, among other things, wipes out Obamacare’s centerpiece – the state’s decision to expand Medicaid? Many commentators are predicting just that – repeal or blockage of health reform. They often point to the fiery partisanship in Washington.

The talking heads are wrong. The raw partisanship in Washington cools in the hands of governors facing the nitty-gritty job of running their states – searching for revenues to design budgets and addressing the pressure from doctors and hospitals and advocates for the vulnerable.

Partisanship has been a tractor beam on many states. Democratic states have moved faster and further towards expanding Medicaid than their Republican counterparts, providing some credence to the recent reports that new Republican governors will hinder reform. What is striking, however, is that partisanship – and particularly steadfast GOP opposition to reform — has often been moderated or overridden by the real-world circumstances facing governors. What could possibly convince a politically skilled GOP governor to take on their party on such a high profile issue?

Carrots. The decision to adopt the expansion of Medicaid rests with states. The federal government has served up an enticing financial package: 100% of the costs for the first three years of the program and 90% afterward.

Hospitals that serve the uninsured and poor are facing dramatic reductions in federal government funding, leaving many to worry about dire financial crises. Medicaid expansion is a lifeline for these providers. It also may help state budgets by picking up the cost of caring for the uninsured, what is known as “uncompensated” or charity care.

Here is one of the most striking patterns in our era of partisan polarization: states with Republican governors in Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and others embraced Medicaid reform. In Arizona for example, conservative firebrand Governor Jan Brewer forced Medicaid reform through the state legislature as an imperative to create jobs, save hospitals, and ensure coverage for Arizona residents. Governor John Kasich passed it by going rogue on his Republican legislature by circumventing them altogether and risking a constitutional crisis.

The Republican recent romp has elected a new crop of pragmatic governors. Maryland Governor-Elect Larry Hogan and Illinois Governor-Elect Bruce Rauner seem poised to find a path forward to implementing reform. Florida’s Scott has supported Medicaid expansion in the past and may find more support in the GOP legislature now that the election is over. Some Republican governors favor reform in a modified form so they can publicly frame it as a “conservative model” that fits their states.

A new normal is arriving. The uncompromising push to repeal Obamacare is being replaced with a pragmatism geared to solving real problems. The irony of the GOP gubernatorial success in 2014 is that it may mark the turning point from vitriolic partisanship to real-world problem solving.

Headline image credit: Election vote. CC0 via Pixabay.

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By John Kincaid

When Elinor Ostrom visited Lafayette College in 2010, the number of my non-political science colleagues who announced familiarity with her work astonished me. Anthropologists, biologists, economists, engineers, environmentalists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and others flocked to see her.

Elinor’s work cut across disciplines and fields of governance because she deftly employed and developed interrelated concepts having applications in multiple settings. A key foundation of these concepts is federalism—an idea central also to the work of her mentor and husband, Vincent Ostrom.

Vincent understood federalism to be a covenantal relationship that establishes unity for collective action while preserving diversity for local self-governance by constitutionally uniting separate political communities into a limited but encompassing political community. Power is divided and shared between concurrent jurisdictions—a general government having certain nationwide duties and multiple constituent governments having broad local responsibilities. These jurisdictions both cooperate and compete. The arrangement is non-hierarchical and animated by multiple centers of power, which, often competing, exhibit flexibility and responsiveness.

From this foundation, one can understand why the Ostroms embraced the concept of polycentricity advanced in Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty (1951), namely, a political or social system consisting of many decision-making centers possessing autonomous, but limited, powers that operate within an encompassing framework of constitutional rules.

This general principle can be applied to the global arena where, like true federalists, the Ostroms rejected the need for a single global institution to solve collective action problems such as environmental protection and common-pool resource management. They advocated polycentric arrangements that enable local actors to make important decisions as close to the affected situation as possible. Hence, the Ostroms also anticipated the revival of the notion of subsidiarity in European federal theory.

But polycentricity also applies to small arenas, such as irrigation districts and metropolitan areas. Elinor and Vincent worked on water governance early in their careers, and both argued that metropolitan areas are best organized polycentrically because urban services have different economies of scale, large bureaucracies have inherent pathologies, and citizens are often crucial in co-producing public services, especially policing (the subject of empirical studies by Elinor and colleagues).

The Ostroms valued largely self-organizing social systems that border on but do not topple into sheer anarchy. Anarchy is a great bugaboo of centralists, who de-value the capacity of citizens to organize for self-governance. Without expert instructions from above, citizens are headless chickens. But this centralist notion exposes citizens to the depredations of vanguard parties and budget-maximizing bureaucrats.

This is why Vincent placed Hamilton’s famous statement in Federalist No. 1 at the heart of his work, namely, “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” The Ostroms expressed abiding confidence in the ability of citizens to organize for self-governance in multi-sized arenas if given opportunities to reflect on their common dilemmas, make reasoned constitutional choices, and acquire resources to follow through with joint action.

Making such arrangements work also requires what Vincent especially emphasized as covenantal values, such as open communication, mutual trust, and reciprocity among the covenanted partners. Thus, polycentric governance, like federal governance, requires both good institutions and healthy processes.

As such, the Ostroms also placed great value on Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of self-interest rightly understood. Indeed, it is the process of self-organizing and engaging one’s fellow citizens that helps participants to understand their self-interest rightly so as to act in collectively beneficial ways without central dictates.

Consequently, another major contribution of the Ostroms was to point out that governance choices are not limited to potentially gargantuan government regulation or potentially selfish privatization. There is a third way grounded in federalism.

John Kincaid is the Robert B. and Helen S. Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service at Lafayette College and Director of the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government. He served as Associate Editor and Editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and has written and lectured extensively on federalism and state and local government.

More on the applications and reflections on the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom can be found in this recently released special issue from Publius: The Journal of Federalism. An addition to this, Publius has also just released a free virtual collection of the most influential articles written by the Ostroms and published in Publiues over the past 23 years.

Publius: The Journal of Federalism is the world’s leading journal devoted to federalism. It is required reading for scholars of many disciplines who want the latest developments, trends, and empirical and theoretical work on federalism and intergovernmental relations.

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By Elvin Lim

Obama’s speech last week was an attempt to be as partisan or liberal as possible, while sounding as reasonable as possible. “Why would that be a partisan issue, helping folks refinance?” the president asked as part of this strategy. The Republican Party continues to suffer an image problem of being out of the mainstream, and the president was trying to capitalize on this moment of vulnerability. There is broad support for preventing the budget “sequester,” on minimum wage legislation, and a path to citizenship for children of immigrants — the president knows it, and he is leveraging public support to try to secure compliance from errant members of Congress.

As he showed in his Second Inaugural Address, this is not a president willing to mince his words any more. To talk about climate change and the “overwhelming judgment of science” is to take a clear, uncompromising position. “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations,” he said, “I will.” Presidents at least since Theodore Roosevelt have painted themselves as active problem-solvers, as opposed to bickering members of Congress, in order to justify a muscular, even unilateral executive branch. Conservatives who are quicker to see this pattern in liberal presidents should remember the perils of presidential bravado in the next conservative administration; liberals who are enjoying their president pulling his weight should pause to consider if they can consistently stomach the same unilateralism in a different time for different purposes, when it is a conservative president who proclaims, “Now’s the time to get it done.”

Get it done. They deserve a vote. Send me a bill. But the Constitution doesn’t work like that. The televised address makes it look like the president is legislator-in-chief, but he is anything but that. He can only execute the law; but to make the law he wants to execute, he needs Congress. So it may be a stroke of luck that a day after Obama’s speech, the news cycle is still consumed with the Christopher Dorner story, suggesting that Americans are tired of politics and political news after the previous year of campaign mud-slinging. Obama’s supporters want him to get on the permanent campaign, but some forget that doing well on the speech circuit could well generate congressional resentment and mobilize the “party of ‘no’” against him. There is a time for splashy, public campaigns; but look out for silent strokes of executive action in the days to come. “Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch” are and remain the hallmarks of the executive Publius defended in Federalist 70. Obama has already signaled unabashedly that he will make the tough decisions. He appears to be doing so very publicly, but there is a secret side to transformative agendas. When the going gets tough and Congress doesn’t get going, expect Obama to be traversing his agenda with much despatch. His State of the Union address this year constitutes full disclosure, if we care to parse it carefully.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com and his column on politics appears on the OUPblog regularly.

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By Elvin Lim

As the situation continues to unfold in Egypt, and as the White House continues to walk a fine line between support for democracy and support for a new regime which may not be as pro-American as Hosni Mubarak’s was, Publius, the author of the Federalist Papers may lend us some wisdom.

It may surprise some people, but Publius was no fan of democracy. “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” Publius wrote in Number 10. The mob cannot rule, though the mob may delegate power to those who can. And that was the genius of 1787 – a full decade after the American revolution, it bears repeating. Revolutions are negative acts where old worlds are shattered; founding, on the other hand, is a positive act, where a new world is created. Egypt has had her fair share of revolutions, and it is high time for a founding that will make a future revolution unnecessary.

But who should the supporters at Tahrir Square anoint to be the leader of a new Egypt? Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm, Publius warned us. The irony of this weekend’s hagiographic celebration of Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday is that the Framers of the US Constitution had hoped to create a system so that we did not have to wait for virtuous men any more, as the history of a capricious world had only done before. Egypt will become a republic when she no longer awaits a Nasser or a Sadat or a Mubarak. Even ElBaradei should not be mistaken for a messiah.

How would Publius have handled the Muslim Brotherhood? Certainly not by banning it, as Hosni Mubarak did. Instead, Publius would have proposed that Egypt bring as many political and religious groups as possible to the negotiating table, and let ambition counteract ambition. “A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy,” Publius wrote, “but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.” If the Muslim Brotherhood supports suppression, then the solution to it is not more suppression, but to engulf it with groups who support liberty.

Finally, Publius’ greatest innovation arguably laid in the fact that he proposed an entirely new constitution, not a mere amendment to the Articles of Confederation, as was the charge of the Continental Congress in 1787. Vice-president Omar Suleiman is apparently now overseeing a committee to oversee amendments to the Constitution, focusing in particular on provisions that would allow the Opposition to run for the Egyptian presidency. This is not a good idea because the Egyptian constitution needs more than piecemeal change. In particular, even the Opposition has been co-opted into believing that Egypt’s problems could be solved by having the right person assume control of the presidency. But the problem lies not just in the manner by which the president is selected, but in the size of the office. Publius stated it well in Number 51, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place