There’s no politics like state politics
The New York Times has a pretty decent roundup of state budget crisis news, as most states careen towards the July 1 start of the next fiscal year. Meanwhile, in light of the California mess, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has evidently done the wise thing and declined to run for governor. The State Senate in New York appears no closer to resolving a power struggle, even as Governor Patterson calls them into special session. And in a bizarre move, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who was recently thwarted in a bid to reject federal stimulus funds, disappeared for four days. It’s unclear who, if anyone, was running the state while Sanford was missing.
It’s to be expected that in a situation of great fiscal stress, problems and tensions that are glossed over in the fat years would break out into the open. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time for a systematic and non-partisan nationwide evaluation of state government performance, along the lines of the study of state legislatures undertaken by the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures in the early 1970s.
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